


live unlike before

by rappaccini



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (but we love them anyway), Alternate Universe-- Vanya Jumps With Five, Angst, Complicated Relationships, Every Single Hargreeves Is An Idiot, F/M, First Kiss, Happy Ending, Humor (lots of it), Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Manipulation, Pining, Pseudo-Incest, Thirteen-Year-Olds Being Thirteen-Year-Olds, and whatever the fuck's going on with diego and grace, childhood crushes, slightly exaggerating everyone's behavior for comedic effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24545230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: When Five jumps to the future, he doesn’t jump alone.(Or, Vanya and Five jump into the future together, and, since Vanya isn't around to cause the apocalypse, they land in 2019, eight days after Reginald dies.)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves/Grace Hargreeves, Grace Hargreeves & Everyone, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, The Hargreeves Family, Vanya Hargreeves & Leonard Peabody
Comments: 137
Kudos: 568





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this ramble I made months ago (if you care about spoilers, don't click it):
> 
> https://rappaccini.tumblr.com/post/189441150478/rappaccini-i-feel-like-we-as-a-fandom-are
> 
> Another case of being possessed by the power of fiveya and cranking out a 50+page fanfic in two days. I guess I'm trying to get it all out before season 2 makes us or breaks us.  
> Don't expect quality like 'homecoming's.' I'm pretty sure I peaked there, but fuck it.

He leaves, as in most universes, he is bound to do: thirteen and full of blustrous pride, vicious determination that he weighs as more valuable than whatever that flickering bond between himself and his sister is, that still doesn’t yet have a name for.

And, unlike in most universes, she follows: also thirteen, and full of fear. Of being alone, of losing him, a fear stronger than the fear of her father that in most worlds binds her to her chair, frozen in place as she watches him go. 

In this world, a different sort of fear drives Vanya at this moment, sending her springing up and after him, her hair swinging behind her.

Hearing the sound of her footsteps against the ivory and onyx checkerboard tile of the foyer, Five’s own slow, by just a pace, and he turns, just as she catches the door and swings it open, taking the steps all in one great clumsy leap. His gaze is hostile at first; he doesn’t realize it’s her, isn’t used to being able to hear Vanya at all.

But he  _ sees  _ her, and, as battery-blue plasma washes from his fists, her hands close around the crook of his arm.

And the two of them are suddenly sometime else.

They stumble, from the orange, watery light of a November sunset to the warm, sunny midday of springtime in the future, and gape at each other in utter delight. He cries out in victory, staring haughtily over their shoulders at the umbrella in brass on the gate, hanging slightly open, and takes off, dragging her along with him in a merry run.

The crackle of space-time is before them again, and their feet leave the ground drenched in summer sun, and they land in winter snow. 

Vanya skids on the ice-slick sidewalk, her shoes too smooth to catch on it. She shrieks in elation or fear or something she doesn’t know at all, as Five catches her, twisting her wrists in his hands and pulls her behind him. The two of them whoop obnoxiously, masters of the universe and all her secrets, veiled from the hostile looks of strangers by a swirl of snow, and they leap again, before the cold can set in. She manages to open her mouth, and capture a fat snowflake in it, before they vanish.

When they land, it is springtime, Vanya supposes, and the sidewalk is wet with rain from fat gray clouds that are rolling on a swift breeze away from them. Behind them is the sun, beating warmly down on their backs, and the air is thick and humid, and it smells like the trees lining their block, which are vibrantly green and in full bloom.

And Five is no longer running or pulling her along, has instead taken a sudden pause. He is doubled over, just slightly, and his breath sounds like tearing paper.

Vanya, reluctant to part from his hand, twists around so she might face him, and leans up to have a look at him. 

He’s pale, with a yellowish tinge to his skin, sweat beading on his forehead and bloodshot eyes, and he sways, so she clings to his arm, hoping to catch him before he falls.

Instead, he catches himself, shaking her gruffly off, and frowns.

“Five?”

“I... can’t.” He sounds dumbfounded. Five’s never  _ dumbfounded. _

“Oh.” Vanya glances around. There are people on the street, cars passing, a cab rolling by them slowly. “Are you tired?”

“I don’t know.” He’s staring at his hands, balling them into fists and loosening them, turning them over and over. She doesn’t let go of his sleeve, tugging at it insistently. 

“Are we stuck?”

“I don’t  _ know,” _ he hisses, “Shit,  _ shit.” _

He glances around, sharp gaze scanning for something desperately, and finds it somewhere behind them, starting off and dragging her after them.

“We’re going home, then?”

“I guess,” he says. “What  _ year  _ is it?”

Vanya scans their surroundings; the makes of the car don’t mean anything to her, nor the clothes on the passersby, but she does jump at the sight of a newspaper kiosk, tugging Five after her as she hurries to it.

_ March 31st, 2019, _ says the city paper, and she wonders if it’s today’s, or yesterday’s.

“It’s a start,” says Five, when she asks him, and he grabs one, keeps a hold of it with his armpit as they march back the way they’d come.

They walk slowly, arm in arm, chatting at first. Seventeen years have blinked by, and their brothers and sister are all to turn thirty soon. Pogo will be ancient and silver-furred. Their father is… however old he is, and they are exactly the same.

“Do you think he can punish us?” Vanya asks, “Seeing as we’re technically thirty.”

Then she remembers who she’s talking about, and feels a little stupid. It doesn’t matter if Dad can, because Dad will.

“Our future selves,” realizes Five, “Will be waiting for us as well. They’ll remember this day, Vanya, when we came to them, and they’ll know exactly how we got back, because  _ they  _ got back, and they’ll know exactly what we’ll say before we say it.” 

“Isn’t that scary?”

“Well,” Five frowns. “Actually…”

“Oh! What do you think we look like?”

“I’m taller,” Five says confidently. “Six feet tall, at least.”

“That’s a little optimistic.”

“I can do it. I’ve got big feet, see? Mom says that means I’m going to grow into them.”

“Sure.” Vanya glances down at her own. “Does this mean I’m done growing?”

Five shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Do you think our faces are different? Oh, what do the uniforms look like?”

“Vanya, we’re thirty now, we won’t  _ have  _ uniforms, because we won’t be  _ living  _ at the house. We’ll have our own places, and jobs, and lives.”

Vanya blinks. She’s never considered having her own life. It’s always felt so far off, and now she’s quite literally burst into it. It’ll be strange, seeing what she’s chosen to do with her life. Nothing great, she knows, she’s ordinary after all, but it’ll still be nice to see, to know where she’s going. Maybe she’s married. Maybe she has a  _ dog! _

“Well, what would we be doing back here, then?”

“Obviously,” Five says, “They know we’ll be coming today. They’ve come back for us.”

“Obviously,” Vanya repeats, a little less convinced than she’ll let on.

Ahead of them is the brass gate, now nearly black with tarnish. It’s swinging open, as the distant shape of a woman dragging something behind her emerges.

“That’s you,” Five says, squeezing her arm excitably, “That’s  _ you, _ coming to greet us!” 

Vanya almost breaks from his grip, ready to sprint into her future self’s arms, proud to announce her arrival, when--

“--Five,” she says, staring at the distant female shape growing larger and larger as they approach her, “That’s  _ Allison.” _

Five squints, then frowns in disappointment. “Oh.”

It’s Allison, thirty and utterly blessed by age, with glowing skin, a halo of golden-dyed curls, and a sleek white pantsuit hugging her curves, lugging an enormous designer suitcase behind her, as she drags it roughly to the cab that had passed them not long ago, and begins cramming it in the backseat. 

Vanya keeps walking, intimidated by her beautiful sister, now even more beautiful, but determined to meet her. In the future, when they are all older and wiser, Allison and she get along wonderfully, and she can’t wait to learn when it starts.

But Five’s grip tugs at her arm; he’s stopped, and she glances back in annoyance, frowning at him. He’s taken the newspaper out from under his arm, flicked it open, and started to read.

His eyes are wide, and Vanya slips over his shoulder, peering down at the paper.

_ Beloved Billionaire Dead, _ the front page declares,  _ Remembering Reginald Hargreeves, Lost One Week Ago. _

“Holy _fuck,”_ she hisses.

“Guess we won’t need to worry about punishment,” Five breathes, and he begins muttering the obituary under his breath, “Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire, philanthropist, inventor, hunter of endangered animals, moon colonist, Olympic gold medalist and adventurer, C.E.O. of _blah-blah-blah….._ is survived by his four children…  _ Four?  _ What idiot misprinted this? Oh shit, do you think some of us got disowned? I’ll bet it was Diego. What do you think he did?”

“Five?”

“Yeah, Vanya?”

“What?”

“What do you want?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

_ “Five?” _

Vanya suddenly feels a jolt of energy zapping down her spine, and she glances up, at where the sound of his name is coming from.

It’s Allison. She’s seen them. Her big brown eyes grow even bigger, nearly popping out of her head, and her mouth flaps open and then closed. She lets her gargantuan suitcase fall right out of the cab, and roll right over the sharp-toed tips of her stilettos. 

Five tightens his grip on her, slides back down to tangle his fingers with hers. 

Behind her, the double doors, with their frosted glass and umbrella insignias and expensive golden handles, fly open, and the biggest man Vanya has ever seen is taking slow, unsteady steps down the stairs, clinging to the rail with a gloved hand.

Just the size of him tells her that she is looking at Luther, who is nearly as wide as he is tall, with massive, twisted shoulders and thick, strangely-shaped arms. He’s staring down at them as though he’s looking at a pair of ghosts.

“Where are we?” asks Five. “The older versions of us, I mean. Where are they?”

Allison taps on the glass of the driver’s window with long, painted nails. “Just go. I’m not making my flight,” she says crisply, before dropping to the curb, as though her legs simply can’t hold her up any longer.

The cab rolls away, and it’s only after it has turned the corner that any of them remembers they can speak.

Allison is first, “There… _are_ no adult versions of you.”

“What are you talking about?” Five demands. “Of course there are.”

There’s something odd about Luther’s voice, it’s husky and dull-edged, like it hasn’t been used in a long time: “We thought that you were dead.”


	2. Chapter 2

Diego gets the call when he’s rewrapping the arm Grace had bandaged for him earlier in the week, reaching for the phone suspiciously and waiting for whoever’s on the other line to announce themselves.  He’s manning the phones for the gym now, is getting almost passable at it, but given his nightly activities, he prefers to let the callers lead.

When he hears her voice, he drops the bullshit; it’s Grace. She never calls. 

“Is Klaus with you?” 

“No. Why?”

“Never mind then,” she says, “Come to the house, dear. You need to get here now. It’s important, and top secret, and it requires the whole family’s presence.”

The last time he’d been called like this, it had been to attend his father’s funeral. The last time a family meeting had been called, it had been about whether Grace would be shut down.

So, he drops everything, throws a shirt on, grabs his knives, heads to the car, and drives furiously at exactly one mile below the speed limit. 

He arrives to see Grace, waiting for him just outside the gate of the Academy, and he smiles, genuinely, at the sight of her, standing just outside of the boundary she’d been set by his father, just to prove that she can, that she’s free now, that she can go _where_ she pleases _when_ she pleases, and it pleases her now to make a little show of it.

Her hair is loose, as she’s taken to wearing it lately, and she’s wearing one of Allison’s tighter skirts. She doesn’t share Allison’s curves, had been sculpted in a thinner, more Barbie-like model, and so it hangs off her a bit awkwardly. All of her clothes had been perfectly tailored to fit her measurements, so he supposes this is just another step in her journey towards individuality, taking things that weren't meant for her and making them her own. 

She smiles at him, in a new way she’s been trying lately, with one corner of her mouth raised higher than the other. It’s a bit odd, in his opinion, but she’s very pleased with it, so he’s pleased with it, and nods at her. 

She’s different around him now, has been since they’d gone on a moonlit walk in the park together, arm in arm, behaving not at all as they were meant to, and content to do so. 

He pauses for a moment, careful to remember to call her “Grace,” and not “Mom.”

She beams when he gets it right, and his heart skips a bit.

It’s weird, he knows, and he's fully aware of what it implies. But everything about this family is upside-down and inside-out, so he supposes that if nothing else, what the two of them seem to be edging towards fits right in, and he’s content to let them stroll over that line when they get to it. He isn’t questioning what sort of horrible fucked up things transpired in his childhood to make him so open to her affection; over the past week, he’s thought a lot about how wrapped up in the past the lot of them have been, and he’s taking at least a few steps now to move into a very different kind of future.

She offers him her hand, which he takes, noting that she has ground the plastic chips of her fingernails down to a much shorter length. He wonders if that has something to do with the latest subject of her interest, which she has discussed with him in great detail over the dinners they’ve had every night since Pogo fixed her malfunctioning: she wants to get a  _ job _ .

“A  _ real  _ job,” she’d said, “One outside the house,” and they’d poured over possibilities that her programming would make her wonderful at-- teacher, engineer, chef, therapist, nanny, accountant, housekeeper, bomb disposal, hairdressing, translation, interior design-- before settling tentatively on  _ surgeon, _ after he’d crawled through the fire escape that led to the shrine that is Five’s room, with his arm carved into like a Christmas ham, and she’d nobly kept him from bleeding out all over his dead brother’s floor _. _

They enter to a scene of chaos: Klaus, in the entryway, nearly barreling over the both of them as he brandishes a string instrument above his head, shrieking at Pogo, who is tottering after him, as red in the face as Diego thinks a monkey can possibly be. 

“That _Vanya’s_ violin?” he asks.

The little cameras in Grace’s eyes whirr. “Oh goodness, it _is.”_

“Well,” Diego shrugs. “Not like she’s around to use it.”

Grace turns to him, opens her mouth, but then Pogo’s in front of them, pausing to greet Diego: “So nice to see you’ve returned again,” to which he replies with a shrug.

Once they’ve acknowledged each other, Pogo’s off through the door. The last thing Diego hears are the sounds of Klaus’s bare feet slapping the stairs, the door slamming, then opening, then slamming again. 

He makes out the vague shape of their argument,  _ something-something-drug-money _ , and he decides to tune it out with dull conversation with Grace, about how the furnishing of her new room is going: Her algorithm has determined the most aesthetically-pleasing arrangement of furniture for the space she has chosen, an enormous guest room they’d never once used, with a massive window facing the street, and she is planning on systematically scanning the inventory of every single antique and furniture store in the city until she determines the correct combination of furnishings that she will use to populate the room. Also, she wants a cat, as her programming finds it immensely pleasing, and he agrees to take her to the shelter this weekend so she may select one. He also decides, privately, to get one for himself. The rats in his basement are back, despite his meticulous cleaning, and he doesn’t feel like sullying his knives with them. Also, cats are soft, and they purr, and that’s kind of nice too.

Grace guides him inside, and at the top of the staircase, in a resplendent wine-red dress with a train longer than he is tall, is Allison. 

Who is still. Fucking. Here.

“You  _ ever  _ gonna get on that plane back to L.A.?” Diego shoots at Allison. 

She doesn’t respond. Simply raises a freshly-manicured middle finger in his direction, and resumes inspecting her hair in the reflection of a nearby window.

“What’s the big deal?” Diego says, “Don’t tell me Luther’s dead too.”

Allison’s quiet, crossing her arms and staring off towards the direction of their old bedrooms.

_ Oh god. Is that a mourning dress? _

“... Luther’s not dead, is he? Allison, is _ he?” _

“No,” says Luther, who Diego is certain had been waiting in the wings for that exact moment to lumber over from the direction of the parlor balcony. “I’m fine.”

“Great.”

“I can feel your enthusiasm.”

“Oh, I’m bursting with joy.”

“My God,” Allison sighs. “The two children in this house are _you,_ after all.”

“Children?” Diego scoffs.

“Yes,” Allison says,  _ “Children." _

“You’re pregnant?” He stares at Luther pointedly. “My regards to the father.”

Luther turns bright red. Diego smirks. 

“No,” Allison groans, “Five and Vanya.”

It takes Diego a full minute to understand what she's said, because why on earth would she bring it up at all, unless...  _ “Huh?” _

“Five and Vanya,” Luther repeats. “They’re back.”

Diego blinks. “What the  _ fuck?” _

“Yep.”

“You’re _bullshitting_ me.”

“No, I am not.”

“You’re… _how?”_

“Our guess is as good as yours,” says Luther. “Our working theory is that it’s a time travel accident.”

Diego’s jaw is hanging, and he remembers the last time he’d seen them-- Five, storming out of dinner in a pompous rage, and Vanya, tearing after him, her hair flying wildly behind her. He hadn’t even known they’d left at all until the next morning, hadn’t understood what it  _ meant _ until weeks later, when the portrait went up over the mantle, and they'd all realized that their family had shrunk by two. He remembers staring at Allison and Luther and Ben and Klaus, full of questions but too afraid to voice them, letting them sink into his brain and rot there, unanswered for years.

He chokes on a laugh, angry and confused and so,  _ so  _ happy all at once. 

“You  _ dressed up _ for this?” he asks Allison, who nods.

“First impressions matter,” she says, completely seriously. “It’s important that they see me as I see myself.”

“What, like a big red peacock?” Diego asks.

“Allison, they’ve  _ already  _ seen you,” says Luther. “We all grew up together.”

“Well, this is the first time they’ll see me as an adult.”

“Allison, you were here when they popped in.”

“Really?” Diego asks, “What was that like?”

“Well, it's kind of hard to say. I was in the window, watching Allison leave, and I had a view of the street. There was this blue light-- you remember what Five’s spatial jumps used to look like, right? It was like that, but this time, both of them popped out, about halfway down the street. And then they came running back, and they started freaking out.”

“Neat.”

“Well,” Allison says, fluffing her feathers, a full minute behind in the conversation, “This is the first time they’ll see me and  _ know  _ it’s me.”

Diego groans. 

Luther smiles indulgently, saying “You do look great though. I think they’ll appreciate the thought.”

Diego, for what it’s worth, appreciates the thought too. But there’s a lot more to this than she’s saying. He considers the timing: Allison’s just lost one kid, and now, a week after Dad was dumped in the mud and they’ve been freed of him at last, two more have been served up to her on a silver platter, and they're the long-lost brother and sister the two of them had vaguely tolerated when they were younger. Of course she’s going to do something ridiculous, now of all times, when she knows no one will punish her for it. Of course, Allison of all people will put her everything into auditioning to be their new mother. 

He doesn’t blame her, exactly. But he  _ does  _ think she looks stupid. 

“I do!”

“I like the boa.”

“You think? I thought it was a bit much.”

“No, it’s great! It’s so  _ you!” _

_ God, if you’re real, open up the earth and swallow me whole right now. I can't take this stupid fucking flirting. _

“Where are they now?” asks Grace, from behind them. 

“They ran for it,” Allison says with a shrug. “Took off as soon as I turned my back. God they’re _ fast, _ too. Those skinny legs can move. Remember when  _ we  _ were that quick?”

“You didn’t  _ chase  _ them, did you?”

“I overreacted.”

“You chased them.”

“I was  _ concerned.” _

“Allison,” Luther says, “You are literally the most terrifying thing in the universe when you’re chasing someone.”

Allison preens at the compliment, and Diego rolls his eyes. It’s true though; he’s never feared for his life more than when she'd discovered that he’d accidentally used her razor in the bathroom, and hunted him ruthlessly through the house for a full day.

“Well, anyway, they’re still in the house, so you can calm down. They’re up in Five’s room. They’ve been there for a while now. Locked the door on me and everything.”

“So?” Diego says, “Kick it in. Luther’ll do it if you don’t want to ruin your Louboutins.”

“No,” Luther says, “I won’t. It’ll scare them.”

“And? They’re kids, not wild animals.”

“Five bites like one,” Allison comments, and Diego is at once reminded of a mission they’d gone on when they were twelve, where Five, pinned down in a corner, had lunged and locked his teeth into a gunman’s neck until it had begun spraying a fountain of blood. He’d had nightmares about Five transforming into a vampire for weeks.

“Fair point,” he allows, “Lead on.”

She does, guiding the group-- sans Grace, who clicks off elsewhere in the house, ostensibly running some errand for Luther-- into the children’s hall, where they sit in the narrow back staircase leading up to Five’s room, and she and Luther brief him on what on earth had happened earlier in the day. 

Klaus is the last to arrive, shuffling in with something in his pocket that is probably drugs. Diego avoids looking at it, tries to pretend he hasn’t seen it at all, and greets him as warmly as he is able.  _ Oh, _ Diego remembers suddenly:  _ the violin. Fuck. _

“You didn’t sell that shit, did you?” Diego asks.

“Sell what? I didn’t sell anything!” Klaus says, “Swear!”

“Then what was all that with Pogo?”

“Hey! I didn’t sell it, promise. I lost hold of it, and that was that.”

Diego sees Luther gesturing to them, and decides to drop it. Fucking _mess,_ he’ll deal with it later.  He’ll have to pick his pocket, and hide whatever Klaus has on him somewhere he won't think to look.

Once assembled, the Hargreeves siblings brief their brother on the development-- here pause, for Klaus going whiter than any ghost he could possibly hide from, and Diego casting him the most venomous glare he can-- and, once all are on the same page, they consider very carefully the best way to integrate their now-younger siblings into the future, and into a post-Dad, post-Mom-now-just-Grace household.

The solution they come to is all four of them thundering up the stairs at once, tearing Allison’s train, and then wrestling for the best spot next to Five’s door, landing twisted up in each other, ears pressed to the door, as they listen to furniture scrape and scratch the floor.

“Are they barricading?” Allison asks, wincing as a particularly obnoxious squeak drags on for several seconds. 

“Definitely,” says Luther. 

“Paranoid little shits,” says Klaus.

After a minute, the noise stops, and the four of them sit, listening to Five and Vanya, rustling like small animals, behind the wall. 

_ They’re building a nest, _ Diego wants to joke, but keeps it to himself.

Pogo hobbles by, and shows little interest in crowding the door with the rest of the family.

“They will emerge when they are ready,” he says to them sagely, when Diego asks, “And not a moment earlier. The longer you all swarm around the door, listening, the longer it will be before they’re comfortable to open it. You, of all children should understand the virtue of privacy.”

Then he hobbles along, after delivering the advice.

It being advice, the Hargreeves siblings naturally reject it, and press harder against the door, listening to the muffled tones of their long-lost siblings, chirping back and forth at one another. They sound like they’re arguing, but it isn’t clear what about.

“You know,” Klaus is whispering, to no one in particular, “I don’t actually remember what Vanya’s voice sounds like. Not before now, anyway.”

Diego nods, and there’s a stinging feeling in his chest as he realizes, to be honest, he isn’t sure he remembers her face. The portrait always ensured that they’d never forget Five’s, but _Vanya’s?_ He can’t even recall what color her eyes were.

“Not Five?” hisses Luther.

“No one can forget Five,” Allison says, “He never shut up.”

Her brothers muse in agreement.

They sit in silence for a while longer, until inevitably, Klaus begins flapping his mouth again.

“So,” Klaus whispers. “Are they,  _ you know?” _

“No Klaus,” Allison sighs, “We don’t know.”

_ “You know _ , having a  _ sleepover?” _

He makes a specific gesture with his hands, and the three of them wince.

“Too far?”

“We don’t need that image, thanks.”

“Well, it’s a  _ concern,” _ Klaus says, “You guys remember when we got The Talk?”

“The Talk?”

“Yeah, the--” Klaus spreads his hands wide, flutters his fingers, “--Birds-and-the-bees? When a boy likes a girl very much? Why masturbation depletes your energy and therefore must be avoided at all costs?”

Diego averts his eyes when Klaus mentions the latter. He’d believed it for quite some time, and is still living it down. 

Klaus’s eyes glaze out for a moment. “Thirteen, I guess, but was it before, or…”

They wait for him to finish, are long-used by now to his odd tangents.

“After, right!” He claps his hands together. “Wow! Luther, Five’s even more of a cherry boy than you are!”

Luther goes red, and Diego presses his palm to his mouth, squeezing his eyes shut, wheezing.

“At any rate,” Klaus continues, “Someone’s going to have to teach them how the world works, and I for one, volunteer--”

“No.”

“Please don’t.”

“Don’t you fucking dare.”

Klaus throws up his hands, and begins backing away. “Alright, alright. We’ve been overruled unanimously. I’ll respect it.” He wheels around a corner in a whirl of black fabric, and is gone.

They sit for a moment, listening. Diego pockets the packet of ambiguously packaged pills he’d just pulled from Klaus’s pocket. He hadn’t had enough time to grab both of them, but one’s a start. With the tolerance Klaus has built up, he probably won’t O.D. from just one. Probably won’t even get  _ high  _ from just one.

Luther leans in to whisper in Allison’s ear, “They’re not… you know,  _ are they?” _

“I have no idea. I didn’t even realize they were friends until they left. I don’t think I know anything about them at all.” 

Diego glances at his siblings, then the door, and reaches up and raps on it five times with his fist, hard. “You guys need a condom?”

A hush falls over the inside. The three of them lean in, pressing their ears to the woodgrain. 

Then, the door  _ thunks, _ and the three of them fall on their asses. Inside, he hears a shoe clatter to the floor, and tittering teenage laughter.

“I haven’t missed  _ that,” _ he remarks, and Allison and Luther groan in agreement.

Diego crawls to his feet, snorting, and limps off to find Grace. His brother and sister follow, Luther carrying Allison’s train in his oversized arms. 

Grace whips around a corner, oddly quiet without her heels, and Diego flinches at the sudden movement. She shrugs, and presents a handful of papers towards Luther, who peers over them and nods excitably.

“What’s that?”

“Adoption papers,” Grace says, “I had the family lawyers draw them up for you, Luther, so we could have them on file.”

“That’s great.”

“Well, what do we need those for?” Diego asks, “They’re  _ our  _ siblings.”

“They’ve been missing for seventeen years, Diego.”

“Not Vanya, dear,” Grace twists her mouth a bit. He thinks she’s trying to grimace, but her mouth isn’t carved that way, won’t let her frown. “You can’t be missing if no one knows you were here in the first place.”

“Well,” Luther says, “At any rate, we need to take some precautions now, so CPS doesn’t break in and take them away from the house.”

“Really?” Diego rolls his eyes. “Child Protective Services? Coming  _ here?” _

Luther blinks.

“It is a little unfeasible,” says Allison. “Everyone loves Dad. Even after Ben’s funeral, everyone still thinks this was all a good idea. That we wanted to do it. They won’t be coming.”

“Well,” he says quietly, defensively, “It’s something to consider. Dad’s dead now, and I know it was him in the end. I  _ know  _ that, but I still think that now that he’s gone, we should still err on the side of caution. Someone could try something, and I want to keep them here, where they belong. With us.”

“Doubtful,” says Allison. “And you think they’re here to stay?”

“I hope so. I miss them.” 

“Wait,” Diego leans over the packet, “ _ Who’s _ gonna be Daddy now?”

“Me, of course,” says Allison.

“No,” replies Grace, and Diego witnesses the pleasant sight of Allison’s face twitching in a dozen places at once, “Allison, dear, I  _ love  _ your enthusiasm, but you’ve got your own custody agreement regarding your daughter to settle before you can make a bid for the children.”

“Bid. Terrible use of wording,” Diego winces, and Luther nods.

“Noted,” says Grace, “I will expunge it from my vernacular immediately.”

“Well,” Allison shrugs, “I mean, is it not true?”

“Look,” Luther says, _"_ _ I’ll _ be adopting them. If it happens that way.”

“Not Klaus?”

“Not Klaus.”

“Good call,” admits Diego. He’d found Klaus snoring in a pool of his own vomit a few days ago, and had to undergo the unpleasant task of spraying him down. Five and Vanya left before Klaus got bad, and he doesn’t want them to find out, doesn’t want  _ any  _ kids around that. 

“And not you, either, Diego,” Luther says, shrugging his great shoulders in apology, “Being in and out of jail, violent record, no address. It doesn’t look good.”

“Yeah?" Diego unsheathes a knife from his harness, begins twirling it on his gloved fingertip, "I don’t care. Why would I care?”

Fine, so he  _ cares.  _ Just a little.

Behind them, there’s a wooden scraping sound. Diego’s pretty sure it’s the door opening, so he turns.  There’s a stripe of light arcing out across the floor as the door swings wide, opening into the past.  Inside, Diego sees them for a second: two pale faces, staring uncertainly out at him. Five’s familiar glare, and just beyond it, Vanya’s face, round and white and dark-eyed and  _ there, _ right in front of him. He thinks he understands how Klaus feels a little better, now that he's just seen his first ghosts.

Then, the door slams shut, and it’s like they hadn’t been there at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh I'm real displeased with this chapter, but I mean, *shrug.* Can't win 'em all.


	3. Chapter 3

Like rats or bats or the many-legged crawling things that had swarmed all over Five when he’d accidentally teleported himself into the crawlspace between two walls at the age of four, hunger is what drives them out of their hiding hole.

They dismantle their barricade and descend under the cover of darkness, from the upper levels of the house where the roof slopes in, down the well-polished stairs. He doesn’t blanche at all at the ways the dark corners of the house reach up to claw at him, the way they had when he’d jumped too far and gotten stuck and needed Luther to claw apart the wall to get him out, because he is not alone. He is navigating the house with Vanya at his side, sliding quietly together in their socked feet until they reach the basement kitchen which they often frequented in much less extraordinary circumstances.

When they arrive, they make quick inventory of the kitchen, tearing open the cupboards in search of something to quiet their insistent stomachs. They’re not used to being hungry, have never gone as long as they have without eating before, and don’t plan to suffer it much longer. They also don’t understand the layout of the kitchen now, and scavenge messily.

Soon, Vanya, brilliant as she is, produces a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter, and an unopened bag of marshmallows that expired in the year 2007-- _Future marshmallows,_ she declares, and asks whether, because they’re from 2002, they should be able to still eat them.

Five agrees with her, because he also does not understand how expiration dates work.

They soon find out, when they bite down on the sandwiches they’ve made-- Five with his marshmallows as the centerpiece of his peanut butter sandwich, Vanya with hers on the side, and with a ground-up dusting of her customary pill-with-dinner, taken from the half-empty bottle she’d had on her when they’d leapt to the future. Their faces screw up like dog snouts, and they both make very interesting sounds from deep in their throats, but like true warriors, they chew and swallow without wasting a bite, and because there are no supervisors to chide them, they lick their plates clean, and wipe smears of peanut butter from their chins. 

When Vanya hops off of her chair and hurries to the sink, to begin washing their plates, she taps Five’s shoulder, to signal to him that she’s ready for his. He passes it to her wordlessly, and the two sit in silence for a few minutes.

A lot’s happened, and it’s going to take a while to come to terms with it all. For now, Five listens to the rattling of the ancient pipes, the rushing of the sink water as it works over the plates, the buzzing of the bulbs overhead, the sounds of footsteps--

_What the fuck?_

Five jerks in his chair, and Vanya turns behind him.

Out of the dark, their siblings descend on them all at once, as if they had been waiting just around the corner for some time for them to emerge. Dramatic little shits.

“We’ve been ambushed,” he says gravely, and he imagines Vanya nodding in agreement behind him. Her small, rough hand closes tightly on his shoulder, as though he will be able to jump them back to safety.

 _… Can_ he?

He isn’t sure, is too doubtful of his sudden failure to carry them back to their own time to try anything else. Especially not with a passenger.

Fine. He’ll parlay. 

Five lets them approach, two on either side, and gets a good look at them: Older, taller, with their skin washed out by the dull bulbs above him. None of them seem to have aged well: Klaus is thin and bony, and swaying unsteadily from his perch on the table, his eyes twitching from Five to Vanya to some empty space just beyond them. 

Allison is beautiful, but cold, staring at him with a calculating twitch in her lip. Bafflingly, she looks like she’s dressed for a red carpet, so stupidly overdressed for sitting in the children’s kitchen at midnight that he almost wants to burst out laughing; she’s a big, overgrown kid playing dress-up, with nowhere at all to go.

Luther is massive, but strangely imbalanced, bending under the weight of his own strength, the ideal mate to Allison, as they are equals in being strange, vaguely pitiable eyesores.

And Diego is… exactly the same. Just in black, and with a wicked scar curving around his ear. 

_They all seem sadder,_ he thinks, like they’re weighed down by something. He isn’t sure what, exactly, needs to talk to Vanya about it.

 _Well, they’re not wearing uniforms,_ he notes, so at least they’ve gotten one thing correct. Though, staring at the feathered monstrosity drooping on Allison’s shoulders, maybe that’s not such a good thing. Maybe Dad’s regulations _were_ meant to protect them from their own idiocy, just like he always says-- _said,_ Five corrects himself. _Dad is dead now. He can say nothing at all about us, and that is why they are dressed as they are, because they can._

The silence keeps going. And going.

Until: “What?” Five barks sharply, and, as if they’ve been roused from a spell, their four adult siblings are launching themselves at the table all at once, snatching chairs, or, in Klaus’s case, crawling right onto the table itself, planting long-toed feet an inch away from his hand. 

He covers his finger with his sleeve, and pushes the foot away. 

Klaus laughs, a high, strange sound that Five isn’t used to hearing at all from him.

“It’s late,” says Luther.

“Don’t tell me, we have a _bedtime?”_ Five asks. “Dad’s dead. I know that. His rules don't apply anymore.”

It’s weird, saying it out loud. He keeps expecting Dad to come stalking in, to reveal that it had all been some kind of twisted prank, and that they are fools for having been lured into it.

He doesn’t. Yet.

And it’s irrational, he and Vanya had said, pouring over the newspaper in the corner of Five’s room earlier today, to think that it _wouldn’t_ be true. But thinking of their father as dead is like looking up in the sky and seeing an empty space where the sun once was. Something utterly unthinkable has happened. 

_Maybe that explains it,_ he thinks, _Why they’re all so fucking strange now. Dad’s gone, and they’re all out of orbit, crashing into each other._

“Oh,” Allison says, “Good, we were wondering how you’d take it.”

The center of attention, as she always loved to be, Allison begins discussing what each of them have been doing in the years Five and Vanya have skipped entirely, leading by proclaiming the obvious, that the Academy had disbanded many years ago.

“Klaus,” she says, “Has been Klaus.”

She doesn’t elaborate, as apparently it’s a touchy subject, and quickly moves on to Diego, who is apparently jobless, homeless and truly, exactly the _same_ as he’d been at thirteen. Which he finds uniquely disturbing.

Also, he apparently attempted to become a cop. And was thrown out of cop school for being too much for them. Which tells him a lot.

Luther has gone to the moon, which Five finds almost unimaginable. 

There’s something odd about Luther, something that’s shifted within him that he can’t quite put a finger on. Just a few hours ago, he’d been seated at the dinner table with him, watching him sitting tall and proud, beaming at Allison and sending constant enamored glances at their father, always worried if he was doing well. 

The simplest thing he can think of to describe it, is that _this_ Luther, this grown Luther, has been cracked open and had the confidence scraped out of him. All that’s left is a bloated, strange-looking body, with a sad face protruding from it, drooping like a mastiff’s. Five, to distract from his own discomfort, cracks a joke about it, about how it looks like he’s packed a ton of marshmallow fluff under his overcoat.

Diego coughs, and Klaus finds an interesting piece of drywall to stare at.

“There was an accident,” Luther says quietly, “It’s not fluff. It's not fat. It’s just me.”

Five’s face burns, and keeps burning. 

Allison reassumes control over the conversation, quickly pivoting attention to herself; _she hasn’t changed_ that _much,_ he guesses, but he is very grateful for it now. 

Allison is an actress, which follows, and she has a child, which doesn’t. The child, Allison explains, is her ex-husband’s. So, it’s not Luther’s, so it was _definitely_ an accident.

Once the initial surprise, of Allison being married and then not, of Allison being a _mother_ at all, wears off, Five processes it: he is an _uncle,_ he has a _niece_ and he has no idea what to do with the information. He doesn’t have an uncle, doesn’t know what the function of them is, other than his suspicion that they’re to be a supplementary father, and to replace the initial father in all duties should he prove weak and unsuitable.

“Where’s your baby?” asks Vanya, and Allison clamps up.

“Claire’s in L.A.” she says, oddly quiet. “I live there now. I flew in for the funeral.”

There’s a long pause, and then: “I don’t have custody.” 

“... Why?”

Allison bites her lip.

“She rumored her,” supplies Diego. 

Vanya tenses behind him.

“Oh,” Five says. 

It’s quiet for a moment, then Allison takes in a quick, shaky breath.

“Now, listen,” she says, “We can make up a room for Vanya--” 

“--We’re staying together,” Five says firmly, and he feels Vanya’s grip tighten approvingly. He swells a bit at this.

“In the same room?” Allison says.

“In the same _bed?”_ Diego raises an eyebrow.

“Yes.” Five does not elaborate. Because he and Vanya have not thought that far yet, and he doesn’t want to push his luck.

“I told you,” Klaus hisses out of the corner of his mouth at Luther, and then turns his attention to Five. “Dear, _sweet_ baby Five, if you’re going to sleep in the same bed as her, I really think you ought to know how to handle what you’re going to wake up with--”

He flinches suddenly, staring off at nothing. 

Five knits his brow, glancing around at the others for some explanation, but finds none.

He takes another look at Klaus, and for the first time notes how much he has changed. He had been tall when they’d left, nearly as tall as Luther, but the years have melted away what little meat was on his bones, and he has been left gaunt and pale, with translucent, green-tinted skin baring the veins in his white arms. He looks like the ghosts he’s so afraid of, and Five is suddenly hit by a scent clinging to Klaus that makes his eyes water, like permanent marker, but… not. He remembers all at once what he’d been doing at the table when they’d rushed out in grand fashion, and his gut curls. 

Seeing his eyes glaze over, the twitchiness of his movements, and that _smell,_ he thinks he gets it: _He’s high, isn’t he?_

As Klaus’s eyes blink back into focus, roll in their sockets to look at him curiously, like he knows something the rest of them don’t, Five decides he doesn’t like looking at him, not at all. In fact, it makes him nervous in a way he can’t explain. So he quickly looks away, leans closer into Vanya, tries not to show his discomfort.

“Nice skirt,” he tries, but the words come out tinny and thin, and he wishes he hadn’t spoken at all.

Klaus waves a tassel playfully, but it still doesn’t put him at ease.

Five glances around again, takes each of their measures, and notices.

“Where’s Ben? Is he late?”

Allison claps a hand over her mouth. Klaus starts staring off into space again, and Diego clears his throat.

“Ben’s dead,” Luther finally says.

“What?” Vanya says, the first time she’s spoken at all in front of them.

Everyone’s gaze flits to Vanya, as if they’d just remembered she’s here at all. He scowls. _Idiots._

“He’s dead,” Luther’s voice goes quiet and warm, like he’s talking to a small animal, and he looks up at Vanya with such a sadness in his eyes that Five’s taken aback. “I’m sorry. It was a while ago.” 

“What happened?” Vanya again.

The four of them glance slowly around at each other, and Luther shakes his head. “We can’t tell you.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because it’s…” Luther trails off, looks to Allison helplessly, and she finishes for him: “Because it’s a lot to handle, and you two are just too young to think about something like that right now.”

It was bad, then. It was really, _really_ bad.

Five’s heart is being clenched by a cold, hard fist, loosening its grip only to give him a moment to catch his breath, before it starts squeezing again.

He can’t believe it. He really can’t believe it. 

Ben is his closest friend in the house, now that Vanya is becoming something much different to him. It’s simply inconceivable, to think that he would not be here to greet them.

And what’s more… He _just saw him,_ a few hours ago, at the dinner table, leaning moodily over his chair, impatient for their father to allow them to sit. Just saw him, flipping through a Chekhov book Five had recommended to him, which Vanya had recommended to him. Just saw him this morning, when they’d snuck off into an alcove to laugh about how he’d switched Luther’s hair gel with lube. Just saw him, _alive._

How does that _happen?_

“No,” Five says, shaking his head slowly. His body’s rejecting it.

Allison sighs, climbing to her feet. 

“Here,” she says, “Can I show you something?”

She extends a hand to him, and her smooth brown arm is bare; he can see the umbrella tattoo branded onto her forearm, the ink so faded that the black is now gray, and the red of the handle is a shade of ruddy brown. His is still fresh.

He doesn’t take the hand she offers, but he does pull himself to his feet, letting the chair scrape across the tile, sliding away from Vanya’s touch and padding quietly after Allison as she gathers her enormous, ridiculous skirt and guides him through the dark guts of the house. 

Five stops dead in his tracks as they pass through the foyer, gapes at his own face, staring down at him coldly in the flickering warm light of a dim, smoldering fire that’s been left alight in the hearth. He hears a little gasp leave Vanya’s mouth, and they’re leaning into each other again.

“Oh,” Allison shrugs, “Dad hung that up a month after you left. He wanted us to remember you.”

He sees Vanya turn, looking at Allison, open her mouth to speak, and then choke on the words. She’s always had a bit of trouble, talking to Allison.

Five interprets: “Were there any of her?”

Allison looks at Vanya, an odd look in her eye, and shakes her head. “No.”

Vanya pulls away from him, folding her arms around her chest and hiding her face with her hair. 

“Besides,” Allison says, walking them out into one of the halls leading to the courtyard, her bare feet padding on the expensive wood flooring, “No one outside the house knew what she looked like, and there weren’t any photos to use as a reference.”

“I guess that makes sense,” says Five, stupidly. 

Outside, in the courtyard, it is cold, and the dewy grass soaks the bottom of his socks. Five winces at the sensation, but does his best to appear unbothered, while he notices Vanya picking up her feet more, beginning to walk on her toes.

The courtyard at night, by virtue of being surrounded on all sides by five stories of brick, is dark, a pit of shadow that has always made him uneasy. He can hear a soft night wind carving around the rooftop, but the oak tree is totally still; the wind never reaches the bottom of the courtyard, and tonight is no exception. 

Some light does, a strange diamond of gray-tinted light from the moon, which has passed overhead some time ago, and in that light, Five makes out a jet-black silhouette, standing imperiously above them, and he draws in a sharp breath through his nose. 

It takes him a full minute, to realize who it’s of, to dismiss the wild notion that somehow, their father is standing out here for no reason other than to frighten him. That is not his father; his father is dead.

It’s Ben, masked and uniformed, older, with an unfamiliar face, staring down at them grimly.

“See?” Allison says. “He’s gone.”

Her big, stupid skirt rustles, and she squirms in the cold uncomfortably, staring back and forth between the two, and shrugging. “Go to bed when you’re ready, okay?”

Vanya nods numbly, and he only stares. When Allison slips back inside, they resume looking.

Ben’s statue looks strange somehow, as though the sculptor had gotten some of the features wrong, but Five supposes that it makes sense. Ben’d died some time after they’d left; why _wouldn’t_ he have grown up to look differently than they remember him?

Five’s eyes sweep slowly down, raking over the plaque at the statue’s base, and he clenches his mouth at what it reads. Oh, it was really, _really_ bad, and he’s _dead._ Dead and long-rotten to nothing in the ground beneath them, if he even got a burial at all, if there was even a body to bury, and their brothers and sister have all mourned him already. 

The sculpture itself is tarnished with age, and though the grass around it has been cut short, the monument has not been buffed at all. One of Ben’s sculpted hands, the open one with the relaxed fingers, and his knee have been rubbed to a dull shine, probably by years of hands reaching up to hold onto him for comfort. None of those hands have been his, and he swallows quickly, to stop from choking.

He wasn’t here. He wasn’t here, and now Ben’s _dead._

Five waits until Vanya slips inside, before he reaches up to tug at the metal fingers and asks, “Did you miss me? After I left?”

No one answers, and he feels stupid for asking, like he’d get a response, like the statue would spring to life and smile down at him, or give him a snort for acting so dumbly.

So he heads inside, and follows Vanya up to bed. She’s waiting for him in the stairwell, and when she trots up the stairs at his heels, he catches her turning to keep an eye on their siblings, gathered in the corner of the hall. With the light coming from behind them, he can only see their vague, yellowish outlines, and their faces are dark, and he can tell that she doesn’t trust them. 

They use the bathroom in shifts, one sitting outside to wait for the other, and she borrows a spare set of his pajamas, tripping over the length of the pants. He walks out to find her crouched with her arms around her knees, popping a pill in her mouth, staring at the closed door to her bedroom. 

Five tenses. “You want to--”

“No,” she answers automatically, “We’re staying together tonight.”

“Oh.” He settles. “Well, that’s good.”

They pad up to his room in silence, wordlessly agree to lock the door, to check and triple-check that it’s truly locked, and pull the wardrobe in front of it.

Once that’s settled, they retire. Vanya takes his sheets and pillow and tries to make a nest on the floor, and Five plants his head on the stiff mattress.

“Do you think,” Vanya says, after the rustling of her sheets dies down, “That there are no older versions of us, because we never make it back? That we stay here, forever?”

Five hisses a breath, hadn’t thought of that at all.

And… well. Dad’s dead. The Academy’s done, and no one, not even Luther, seems to care about bringing it back. There’s no structure to the life they’ve landed in, but they can _also_ do anything with it…

But. Ben isn’t here to share it with them. So there’s no point.

“No,” he replies. “We haven’t made it back _yet._ We just have to figure that out on our own.”

“But if we’re not here, then doesn’t that mean--”

“It means nothing,” he says, and then quietly, for himself: “It means _nothing."_

Vanya tosses a pillow up onto the bed, and he grunts as it smacks him in the face.

She follows, with the sheets knotted in her hands. 

“I don’t want to sleep down there,” she explains, and it’s too dark to make out her face. He guesses that she’s embarrassed. “The floor’s too hard.”

“My mattress isn’t that much better.”

“Better than mine.”

He can’t argue with that, remembers just this morning, which was also seventeen years ago, plopping down on Vanya’s bed to tell her his grand plan to leap into the future, and wincing at the springs digging into his ass.

 _Some plan,_ he thinks now. 

She tucks them in fussily, dividing his bed down the middle, with a pillow serving as a barrier between their respective sides. He frowns, and crawls over her, nudging her near the wall. He takes the side closest to the door, closer to the bedside table, where his switchblade lays in a drawer within arm’s reach. Just in case.

They sit in silence, listening to each other’s breathing, and hers evens out quickly. She’s always been a deep sleeper, so she’s told him, and now he sees it firsthand. She doesn’t even budge at all when he steals more of the covers.

He lays flat on his back, staring at the cracks in his sloped green ceiling, and wishes he could do the same. 

_I’ll fix it,_ he thinks. _I’ll figure this out, and get us back, and I’ll fix it._

Vanya stirs beside him, and he’s left with his thoughts.


	4. Chapter 4

Five’s mattress is much softer than hers, probably by design, and it’s bigger too; there’s enough room for the both of them to sleep side by side, yet somehow they’ve twisted up together in the corner nearest to the wall, his arm thrown over her, sheets knotted around their legs. She likes the closeness of it, and the warmth, too, and she burrows deeper into the blankets. 

Vanya has always been slow to wake, and even in the future, even dropped into a different world, she can’t seem to pull herself out of bed all at once. She drifts aimlessly in and out of sleep, vaguely aware of where she is in time and space, watching the pale light of dawn grow warmer each time she opens her eyes again. A few times, she thinks about crawling out from beneath Five, but then she remembers the wardrobe, watching over them, and she swallows, thinking about what’s beyond it, and decides to wait a while longer. 

The fourth or fifth time she wakes, she slowly realizes with annoyance that there’s something damp on her shoulder.

Vanya peels a sleepy eye open, and realizes that it’s drool. Five’s drool; his chin’s on her shoulder, and his mouth’s lolling open.

Vanya grimaces in disgust, shoving him off of her quickly, and hopping out of bed.

Five awakens all at once, like a cat, and sits up immediately. He scowls after her as he crawls out of bed and moves to help her pick through the wardrobe.

He lets her borrow a pair of his shorts, and politely jumps off to the bathroom to allow her to change in privacy. She takes her morning pill, combs her fingers through her hair, and listens to the soft tapping of footsteps a floor below her, unable to discern whose are whose. When he returns, he helps her drag the wardrobe away from the door, and they trade places.

She turns the knob in her hand, hesitating for a while before she opens it a crack, to see if anyone’s waiting outside for her. There is no one, and she relaxes, but hears the clink of Five’s chalk over her shoulder.

Vanya turns to look, and frowns. Five has drawn a fresh piece of chalk out of his box, and is setting to work on his walls.

“Five?”

Nothing.

“Five.  _ Five.” _

“Yes?”

“I’m gonna go make something to eat.”

He hums. 

She furrows her brow at the dismissiveness of his tone, but lets him be, treading uncertainly into the house. She doesn’t understand why she’s nearly tiptoeing, Dad is dead and there doesn’t seem to be a schedule anymore, so she shouldn’t be worried about punishment for missing breakfast, if there even is one at all. She still stays on her toes.

Vanya knows the way to the children’s kitchen by heart, of course, but she still finds it oddly exhausting to make the journey. She finds herself ducking behind a wall when she sees Diego’s dark shape stalking out a side door, not realizing she’s there at all.

The sputtering of a car starting bleeds through the wall, and Vanya presses her nose to a dusty window, watching him pull away. He won’t see her watching; all the ground-floor windows are frosted or stained, or else one-way, to discourage the paparazzi, though none seem to be outside. 

She does not chase after him. She hasn’t gotten along at all with Diego since she was seven years old. It’s been seventeen years since he's seen her, but she doesn’t think he’ll suddenly be sweet to her again.

Vanya enters the basement kitchen, and to her dismay, it is crowded. 

Luther is seated at the table, taking up the majority of one of its sides. There’s a pen behind his ear, and he is quietly mouthing along to something he is reading, quite seriously. He looks up when he sees her enter, gives her a little wave, and has an odd smile on his face.

Vanya is not used to Luther acknowledging her. He’d always been informal and polite to her, always mindful of the rules Dad had placed around interactions with her. She doesn’t quite know what to do with this newer, older, sadder Luther, but she waves back, a little uncomfortably.

It takes Vanya a moment to recognize that the blonde woman by his side, helping him peer through a mountain of dull-looking papers, clad in sweatpants but with a full face of perfect, permanent makeup is--

_ “Mom?” _ It escapes her mouth before she can stop it, and she immediately winces, wishes for all the world that some long-latent power Dad had simply never discovered in her would spark into being, and it would be the ability to slip through the floor, into the earth below the mansion, like water through a crack in the floor.

It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t.

But Mom straightens, fixes her with her permanently perfect smile. Everyone is different, but Mom’s face is exactly the same as it had been yesterday, seventeen years ago.

“Hi Mom!”

Vanya races to her, throwing herself into her arms, doesn’t care at all that Luther is right beside her, but she does not feel the cool plastic of Mom’s arms closing around her.

Instead, she hears a soft whirring inside of Mom’s head, where her processors lie. She’s thinking, hard.

Vanya draws back, and Mom has schooled her face into a look of pleasant disappointment. 

“Dear,” Mom says, delicately. There’s something strange about her voice, something in the pitch that’s different, that Vanya has never heard before. “I’m very happy that you’re back. I missed you so, so much, you know!”

There’s a but.

_ " But," _ Mom’s hands find Vanya’s forearms, sliding down to gently rest on her wrists. “A lot has changed, since you left. Your father is no longer here, and your brothers and sister are now no longer beholden to him, and so many things are now different.”

“I…”

“One of those things,” she says, pausing for a while, glass eyes twitching as she formulates her sentence, “Is that I am free as well.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am free,” she says, “I can leave the house as I please. I can express anger, if I feel so inclined. I can write my own code. And I have decided that I would like to be called Grace now.”

“But… why?”

“Oh, dear, I am so  _ very  _ sorry, but in the past few days, I have experienced a great many changes to my programming. I had to be restarted, you see, my battery gave out. I was revived, but in order to do so, many adjustments had to be made.”

“What kind of adjustments?”

“Well, for one, I seem to have lost some of my memory. Nothing essential, though. Blocks of it, here and there.” She cocks her head, “And, I’ve been allowed control over my internal directives. So I’ve spent the week making a great many changes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Vanya,” Grace sighs artificially, a metallic huffing from somewhere below the speakers in her mouth, “I’d decided not to be your mother anymore.”

“What?”

Luther tenses on the seat next to her. 

“Your brothers and sister have grown up, and they've been adults for many years now. And you and Five had been gone for so long; we believed you’d never return. I had done the calculations myself, you know, and the odds of your arriving so long after your disappearance were less than nought point nought eight percent.”

Vanya feels a little dizzy.

“And your father is no longer with us. So, after I finished my calculations, I found that there was no practical reason for me to be your mother any longer. If I was to remain, I had determined I would have to serve some other function. I’ve done it before you know; when you were brought into line and no longer required special attention, after your father determined I was to be more than just  _ your  _ nanny, he made the adjustments necessary for me to mother all seven of you equally--”

“What?” asks Luther.

“So, you don’t…”

“Oh, Vanya,” Grace says, reaching up to play with the end of her hair, “I love you,  _ each  _ of you, and that won’t change; that love is far too essential to my core directives to replace entirely, you know. But I _can’t_ serve as your mother now; it is no longer my primary function. I've removed many of the commands central to performing such tasks.  And I do not even have the capacity to regret it. I am so very sorry.” 

Vanya has no idea what she’s talking about. She’s  _ Mom,  _ she makes cookies and listens to Vanya play  Saint-Saëns , and pets her hair when she cries,  _ she can’t just… _

Allison is here now, and has entered the kitchen in relative silence, which Vanya finds incredibly strange. She looks different, of course, is older and more beautiful, with her curls dyed gold and shining warmly in the light. 

She looks  _ better, _ Vanya decides, now she’s left the arterial bird of paradise getup behind. Allison is now in a simple striped shirt and a pair of jeans, something that the Allison Vanya knows, the thirteen-year-old, would have turned up her nose and scoffed at. She isn’t puffed up with self-importance, hungry for everyone to turn their eyes to her, just standing and waiting to be noticed. 

“Good morning!” Allison says, and her voice is as smooth and pleasant as Vanya remembers, just a bit deeper. “Did you two sleep well? I just cancelled my flight so I could see you both settle in.”

Vanya stays quiet.

“Here!” Allison says, too nicely; she’s an  _ actress  _ now, Vanya remembers, a practiced liar, but she doesn’t seem to be any good at it. She can tell how hard Allison’s trying to pretend like the words are coming from her naturally, like they aren’t quivering. “I made you both breakfast, and was on my way up to give it to you.”

Allison unsteadily lifts a large, unwieldy tray off the kitchen counter, which looks like it has survived a hurricane. The tray looks absurdly heavy, piled high with molten pancakes, glasses of orange juice and various flavors of milk clinking together and spilling, blackened crisps of bacon mixed in with the most unappetizing scrambled eggs she’s ever seen. It’s a disaster. She’s probably spent the entire morning on it. There's flour in her hair and egg on her shirt.

Vanya can’t answer; her throat’s so dry and her head’s pounding. It’s like she isn’t looking at Allison at  _ all, _ like a stranger’s wearing her skin.

She just can’t trust it. She can’t. 

Vanya doesn’t take the tray Allison offers. She’s never been one for pranks, not like Klaus and Five are-- or, not like they  _ were-- _ but she’s changed so much; she could do  _ anything  _ now. She doesn’t know this new Allison at all, and it’s too soon to take anything of hers. 

Instead she makes her own food, two plates of bland toast, and carries them up to Five.

He’s dragging a hand over his wall when she returns, cursing under his breath as he smears clouds of chalk over his work.

He’s run into a wall, with whatever he’s working on. She’s glad she brought him something, he could use a break.

She sets his plate in front of him, and leans against his desk, eating her own.

Five doesn’t turn at all, doesn’t notice she’s here, doesn’t thank her.

Vanya is not supposed to speak; their arrangement is that he often vanishes into his own head, only tends to come out on his own accord, so long as she waits patiently for him to acknowledge her.

But she waits and waits, and he doesn’t. So she huffs, and stomps away, the rejection digging into her and injecting its venom. 

Vanya traverses her home as though she were an explorer who’s just touched down on a foreign planet; and in many ways, though the house’s walls and halls are exactly the same as the ones she’d trod only yesterday, something about it is fundamentally different in a way that feels permanent.

It’s older, she realizes, running her fingers along the walls, tracing cracks and dents and stains that weren’t there before. Everything is faded and coated with dust, though she can see shiny trails of footprints wandering throughout the house. It is lived-in, but no longer immaculate and untouchable, like a museum.

When she gets to the hall, she starts running her hands over all the taxidermied animals in it, stroking their limp, carpetlike fur as she’s never been allowed to before. She wraps her hands around the antlers of a moose, and uses them to anchor herself as she climbs halfway up the wall, kicking off and leaping into the air, before she lands on the tile with a  _ thump.  _ She’s thought about doing that a lot, and Dad’s wrong, see, the antlers  _ didn’t  _ come crumbling off.

Vanya enters the far end of the foyer, near the bar, and she realizes quickly that Klaus is there, rifling through the cupboards. He has not noticed her at all yet, so at least that has carried over from the past rather seamlessly. 

She thinks about going to talk to him, as perhaps, like Mom--  _ Grace  _ said, now that Dad is gone, he may be able to show an interest in her.

Then Vanya sees the lolling of his head, and the full glass in his hand, the bottle of amber liquid beside him. A prickle of unease skitters down her back. She isn’t sure at all about what will happen, if she approaches him now.

She decides against it, and hurries on. 

The foyer is full of dangers, she finds, as she does not travel far before rediscovering the great portrait of Five, as tall as she is, looming over the hall. It stares down at her with glassy, empty eyes that somehow look exactly like  _ her  _ Five’s, and nothing at all like them. A stranger, wearing his face.

Everywhere, it seems, there are memorials to him. His bedroom, when they’d retreated to it, had been perfectly preserved, with every book and toy and stray model robot exactly where he’d left them the morning they’d left.

There doesn’t seem to be one anywhere for her.

Pogo finds her then, gives her one of his warm, soft hugs, and tells her that he has his own private shrine to her, a few photos he’s kept hidden in his bureau.

“Do you remember,” he asks, “The day the photographer came when you were twelve, and I had you pose for him?”

Yes, she does. She had been so excited to be seen by someone, especially since the photographer had signed all the required nondisclosure agreements to be allowed to learn that she existed, and then the vicious flash of the bulb had given her a migraine. She hadn’t been able to play her violin for a full day, the sound was too much, jackhammering into her skull.

“Would you like me to bring them out for you?” Pogo asks.

“No,” she says, after a long moment. “Do you have my violin, by any chance?”

Everything’s so strange now. She needs her music, needs to feel something that makes sense, needs to get her bow and her violin in her hands and fill the house with something familiar. She needs it like she needs air.

There’s a clattering sound, over at the bar. Klaus has dropped something.

“Miss Vanya...” Pogo is solemn, glancing off towards Klaus’s mess. He pauses a moment, staring severely at him, and Vanya politely keeps her back turned to him, to keep one less set of eyes from scouring him.

“I seem to have misplaced it,” Pogo says, after thinking.

“Oh.” She feels her heart drop. “Well, that’s okay. I can, um…”

Vanya glances around, anxious for something to do. “I can help you find it. It’ll be like hide and seek!”

She scurries off, and begins picking through the house, hurrying through the library, the conservatory, the training rooms. She even peers into the main kitchen, the one only Mom--  _ Grace  _ had been allowed in and feels a little stupid thinking that a violin would be left in a cupboard beside a bag of sugar. 

Eventually, she works her way up to the bedrooms, and after checking Allison and Luther’s rooms, she turns the knob to her own door, and steps in.

And her room is gone.

Her bed and her dresser and her music stand and her stack of books are gone. 

The shape of the room itself is gutted, the wall to the left torn out with a rim of ragged brick left behind. It looks like…

Klaus is here, sitting in the corner of the room, where his bed has been shoved, and she realizes that he has taken hers into his own, and thrown it all out.

“Hey,” he says, setting his knitting down. Then, his eyes, rimmed in three-day-old kohl and pink-stained, widen. He starts staring over her shoulder, like there’s a teleprompter there and he’s reading a script, “No, I… I can’t say  _ that…  _ Okay, uh. Listen.”

She folds her arms around her middle and squeezes tightly.

“About your violin.”

Her heart skips.

“What about my violin?”

“Pogo… No, I may have, uh.” He won’t look at her, prefers to stare at the wall just behind her. He's guilty. “I may have… Oh, man, I took it, okay?”

“You took it?”

“Yeah, I needed some money, for some stuff. You know, adult stuff.”

“For drugs.”

“For drugs. And Pogo didn’t let me take it, and there was a fight, and I got mad, and I overreacted, and I… God, I can’t say  _ that.” _

He goes distant again, and she starts tapping her foot in irritation, glaring at the art he’s scrawled on her walls, that’s clearly been here longer than the week Dad’s been dead. Her paintings, the ones she’d begged to be allowed to hang, are gone.  _ Of course he’d get away with this, _ she thinks bitterly, staring at what he’s scribbled in their place.

“Oh, uh. Yeah. Welcome to my room.”

“Your room.”

“Yeah, uh… Hey, hey, listen, I waited a while after you were gone.”

“How long.”

Klaus is staring over her shoulder again. He’s probably high, probably seeing things.

“About three weeks,” He admits, softly.

Vanya scoffs. Her eyes are burning.

“I didn’t think you were coming back,” he says, throwing up his hands. Something’s scrawled on his palms, marker or tattoo ink, she can’t tell. “None of us were. And I just...”

“You what?”

Klaus begins snapping at his conscience again, and Vanya huffs when he shifts his leg, revealing a bong wrapped up in his blankets by his side. 

She’s had enough. Vanya whirls out of her room, which isn’t her room anymore, and stomps upstairs. 

Behind her, she hears Klaus rambling to no one, “God, I  _ do  _ have a problem, don’t I?”

She hates the house. She hates it so much. She wants to tear it to splinters and scream until the ceiling caves in. Everything’s simply  _ too  _ different, and every trace of her is gone in the house. Somehow, with their father gone, it feels even  _ less  _ like she belongs here.

Vanya arrives in Five’s doorway. “My room’s gone,” she says, and Five is nonresponsive.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Vanya steps into his room, folds her arms behind her back, waits for him to turn to her and cock his head, “My  _ room’s  _ gone. Klaus took it. He tore down the wall and everything. All my things are gone.”

Vanya is ordinary and powerless and stupid. She can’t fight her own battles, especially not against people as powerful as any of her siblings, so Five must do it for her. This is a part of their arrangement; it’s why they’ve become friends in the first place. Five is bored of the Academy and what it stands for, angry that he cannot leave it, so he had taken to rebellion, and as it is against the rules in their household for the Academy to allow Vanya any attention, he had taken to  _ her. _

She had accepted it; Five is special. The sky is watching him, wide open and eager to watch him take to it. He is going to  _ be  _ somebody, and a bit of that may rub off on her, if she studies him closely enough. Not that it has yet, but it will. Maybe.

Things have changed a bit since that initial courting period, in which they tried each other on and found that they like each other very much, even more than they’d even expected; he is funny and handsome and brave and interesting, and he asks about what she wants to do when they leave the house, and they make many plans together.

But still, some of that initial agreement remains, so when Vanya tells him about how she’s been mistreated, she expects him to set his chalk down, to turn around full of righteous indignation, to declare war on Klaus on her behalf, to begin devising the first of a series of brilliant pranks to avenge her. 

Instead, he keeps writing. 

The back of her neck goes hot. 

_ “Five.”  _

“I’m busy,” he says, scratching away.

“With  _ what?” _

“Time travel.” 

Vanya scoffs. What’s gotten  _ into _ him? He’s never been  _ this  _ obsessed.

“Oh, and time travel’s  _ so important,  _ huh?”  _ More important than me? _

“Yeah, actually, it is.” His chalk snaps, and he curses, goes digging in his box for a fresh stick, but finds none.

Vanya huffs. “Why’s that?”

“Ben’s dead,” he says, drawing his hand away from the wall and wringing his wrist, “He’s dead. And I wasn’t there to help.”

Vanya blinks, suddenly ashamed at her childishness.

She reaches a tentative hand towards his back, but he goes rigid at her touch.

“I could have taken everyone with me. But I didn’t and…”

“And? Five,  _ and?”  _

Five draws in a hissing breath. 

“And,” he turns, fixing her with a glare, “I can’t find a way back.”

“Well, that’s alright, it’ll just take a minute for you to--”

“No,” he snaps, brandishing a hand that makes Vanya flinch, “No, you don’t  _ get  _ it. You...” He sighs. “Why did you  _ do  _ that?”

“Do what?” she asks.

_ “Run after me. _ ”

Vanya flinches.

“I had all my calculations figured out, you know. Every last variable accounted for. But it was all for  _ one person.” _

“Five.”

_ “You’re _ the reason why we came here, you know that?” he snaps, jabbing his finger into her chest.  _ “You’re _ why I can’t get back. And all these bad things happened because I wasn’t there to stop them, and I wasn’t there because of you.”

Vanya feels a whimper beginning to rise in her chest, tries to swallow it, wants so badly not to look weak, not in front of  _ Five. _

“Luther got hurt and now he looks like _that..._ Klaus is all fucked up... Allison hurt her kid... Diego's still a jackass... Ben's _dead..._ All of this happened  _ because of you--”  _

She shoves him out of her way, turns on her heel, and races out the door. She hears the clinking of his chalk shattering on the floor just behind her, knows he must have thrown it. When she’s flying down the stairs, she hears his door slam, making the walls shake. 

Vanya races out of the house, down the steps, around and into the alley behind it, trying to outrun her emotions, trying to find somewhere private when they catch up to her. 

Something crunches under her foot, and she stops, glancing down, expecting to see a cockroach.

It’s not a cockroach. It’s a splinter of warm brown wood, surrounded by more and more splinters and--

It’s her violin, she realizes. She’s found it.

It’s been utterly destroyed. She sees the fingerboard shattered into dozens of tiny black chips, with the wires curled and useless, horsehair strewn everywhere, the body itself broken in half roughly at the waist and so splintered she’s sure she’ll  _ never  _ find all the pieces.

“Oh,” she says, “Oh  _ no.” _

And then all at once, she’s on her knees, crying. Loudly, childishly, with her cries bouncing up the brick walls of the buildings around her towards the sky. She can’t see anything at all, with her bangs falling in her face and her tears blurring her eyes, but she’s picking weakly at the pieces, trying to gather them in her hands, but there are just  _ too many--  _

“Hey.”

She looks up.

There’s a man, crouching next to her. He’s pale, with a pleasant face and dark eyes, and a lopsided swish of brown hair. He looks nervous, a little embarrassed, but kind.

“Are you okay?”

Vanya stares.

“Oh,” he stares down at the shards of wood on the pavement, “I’m an idiot, of  _ course  _ you’re not…” He pauses, frowns in thought.

“I’m Vanya,” she says, and he smiles at her.

“Leonard,” he replies, extending a hand for her to shake, which she takes. It’s warm and rough, and a little tight. “Great to meet you.”

Vanya flushes. She’s not used to getting attention quite like this, not from a  _ stranger.  _ He sits with her, picking up the pieces of the violin, tutting sadly at the mess.

“What are the chances,” he says, a warm little laugh threaded through his words, as he picks up the scroll of the violin, rolling it carefully between his fingers, “You know, I’ve actually been working on a violin back at my shop. I’m a woodworker, you see. I fix things like violins for a living. And I’ve had this one for a while; I’ve been meaning to fix it up for myself, but… if you want…”

She wants. She wants  _ so  _ badly.

So when he extends a hand to her, she takes it eagerly. And when he guides her towards his truck, she climbs in without question. And when he drives away, she doesn’t look back.


	5. Chapter 5

There’s a photo of his grandmother’s cabin hanging on the wall in his back workshop. It had been one of the few places Harold Jenkins had always felt genuinely happy in; it had been almost like a spell had hung over the place, that had always left his father in a pleasant mood. He never had to worry there.

At the cabin, his father taught him how to fish, the only useful thing he’d ever been taught. Years later, Harold, now Leonard, recalled this lesson, when enacting his plan.

Step one: Do your research. Spend some time at the fishing hole, getting to know the water, the good places to stand and sit, the fish that live there.

So, for the past few weeks, he’s added passing the Hargreeves mansion into his daily routine. And, once the weather cleared, once the old man had died, he started spending a few hours every day just… watching. For what, he didn't know at the time, only that he would know it when he saw it.

The day of the funeral, he sees it, and in reward for his patience he strikes gold: a journal, written by Sir Reginald himself, packed with all the information he could possibly need on each of the four remaining Academy members, even revealing a seventh he hadn’t even realized existed, one he’d have loved to get his hands on to finish his collection, had the old man not seen fit to hide her away from him. 

Leonard had a lot of time to himself in prison, and even after he’d gotten out; years locked away had stolen the ability to be at ease around people from him. Even after changing his name, after reintroducing himself to the neighbors as Leonard Peabody, the new owner of the Jenkins house, after assuming and resurrecting his father’s business, after starting the ex-con recreation program that earned him an award from the city and a fluff piece in the City Paper that he has hanging on the shop wall… well. He just can’t seem to make any connections that stick, and has little patience for anyone at all unless they’re accomplishing something together. He’s very used to spending all his free time on his own, reading old Umbrella Academy comics, watching reruns of the Hanna Barbara tie-in cartoon, playing the PC game. So he’d taken to reading the journal with excitement, and begun narrowing down the list of which fish he’d wanted to catch. 

Two won’t be an option; he’d be stabbed in a second if he tried to approach him, and his habits are so irregular that Leonard assumed he'd never even get a chance to do so. 

Three? Absolutely not. Leonard doesn’t plan to get his chest caved in by a stiletto, thank you very much, and besides, that power of hers would be too much of a risk. Beyond that, she seemed like she’d be in town for only a few days, and would then be back in California, cheating herself into another A-list film and another A-list star's bed to try and salvage her reputation as America’s Sweetheart. 

Six is dead, so that’s that. No need to worry about him; he's already gotten what's coming to him. 

Five and the elusive Number Seven had been missing, vanished into the aether, so he hadn’t considered them at all at the beginning of the week.

So that left Four and One, both vulnerable in their own ways, but also more inaccessible than he'd like. Leonard had been devising plans for both of them, debating which would end up having more of a success rate. 

Four, or ‘Klaus’ he supposes he’d have to call him, is an addict, and therefore a slave to his next fix. All he’d have to do, Leonard had determined, was become his supplier, and he’d have him.

(But, aside from the unpleasantness that goes along with somehow becoming a drug dealer, Leonard has this to consider: He’s an addict. Leonard had tracked the comings and goings of the house for months, and there had been no pattern at all to his movements; Klaus simply came and went as he pleased, and he had concluded long ago that the man simply wouldn’t have any motivation for a revenge plot. Even if Leonard were to ply him with uppers, he’d just be out the door and gone, far too unreliable to be used as a tool, and for his family to trust enough to lure into any sort of trap Leonard would devise. And what’s more, what  _ use  _ would his powers be, really?)

One-- no,  _ ‘Luther’--  _ he corrects himself, is a lonely, simple man with, as his father put it “a masochistic desire to please.” He’s back from the moon, alone for the first time, and according to the journal, is highly dependent. He's better, in all ways. Consistent habits, eager to please, the right kind of power to put to use.

_(But._ His hopes are all hanging on what-ifs:  _ What if _ Luther is adrift and in need of new purpose?  _ What if _ he, the greatest of the Hargreeves lapdogs, could be turned?  _ What if _ his great strength can be used against his siblings?  _ What if _ he won’t just see through Leonard's plans for him, and snap him in two?)

Leonard had been debating the two: Take the chance on One, or try a higher failure rate with Four (for the record, yesterday, he had been leaning towards One, had devised a plan in which he would wait for the man to grow lonely and alone in that great house, which would not take long, and then he would knock on the door, asking to kindly admire the beautiful woodwork on the banister; once inside, he would begin his work) when  _ then, _ in a burst of blue, came little numbers Five and Seven, and when he watched Klaus smash the girl’s violin into smithereens in the alley where he’d picked up the journal not a week ago, there had been his answer.

Little Seven, unaware of herself, so isolated he’s certain that it would take nothing at all to reel her in. He hates the Academy, bunch of posers they are. They’d been a terrible influence on him, and no doubt had been the same to her. 

Lonely, hungry for affection, not likely to be missed for a while if she slips away from the rest of her pack. And a dormant time bomb, primed and ready for him to start the timer.

Step two: Bait the hook; an old violin, buried in the back of his shop, brought out, buffed up and stringed as well as he’s able, dropped smoothly into conversation with the girl when she inevitably went out in search of the instrument her father had written that she had so loved. (It's all just falling into place; he'd almost laughed out loud when he'd seen her addict brother smash her instrument in a rage when he fought with that monkey butler. They're _handing her_ to him on a silver platter.)

Step three: He casts his rod with conversation on the drive over, mentioning an interest in the violin that he does not have, that his dear father died (which he did) recently (which he did not), that they’d had a difficult relationship (which they did), that he intends to understand him better through music (which he does not), though he simply has no idea where to start.

She’s not very smart, he decides, based on how her jaw keeps flapping on about how great her siblings are on the drive over.  _ Don’t you get it? _ he wants to spit, _ They hate you. They abused you. They’re just as bad as your father was to you, and are even worse now that they’re still behaving like brats even after he’s dead. They can’t love you, and if you honestly think they can, then maybe you deserve to feel as bad as you do. _

So he has to adjust. She won’t be a conscious participant in what he has planned, not at first, but that’ll be fine. He has plenty of time to fix her, to save her from the terrible influence they’ve raised her in. He’s lucky she’s as young as she is. This is good; she’ll be much more receptive to change, much more inclined to obey him. 

_ She’s like a puppy, _ he realizes, watching her scamper excitably throughout his store, pointing out tools and armoires and figurines and asking about them. 

And, like any new pet, she’s trying his patience; she keeps bringing them up, mentioning that  _ whatshisname  _ loved to build models, and  _ whoeverthefuck  _ was good at math too, and  _ so-and-so  _ used to love carving into everything into the house, and he has to pretend to care. Honestly. Give him the Oscar now. 

But she’s malleable enough, so when he brings out the violin, and begs her to perform a private concert for her, turns the sign on the door to  _ closed  _ so no one could possibly interrupt them, she drops the subject of her Stockholm Syndrome easily, nibbles at the bait of her own accord.

“You know,” he says, after listening to her perform a perfectly mediocre demonstration of _Frère_ _ Jacques _ on the violin he’s made for her, “You’re _really_ talented at this.”

She blushes, bringing up a pale hand to play with her hair, and he’s seen enough movies to know what that means. 

_ Alright. Fine, she has a crush. I can work with that. _

“You know,” he is careful to bring his arm up, rub the back of his neck bashfully, to let the bait wiggle just a bit, but only just enough to let her find it on her own, “I’ve always wanted to learn to play. Never got around to it I guess.”

And she bites it.

“I could teach you!” she says brightly, and he doesn’t have to pretend to smile at the earnestness of her tone.

“Oh,” he says, keeping his voice quiet, making her lean in to listen, “I don’t know about that. See, I’m not very good at anything in particular. I’m afraid I might just embarrass myself, starting now.”

She falls over herself to praise him, and he marvels at how he doesn’t have to try at all, wants to pat her on her shiny little head and call her a  _ good girl. _ Oh, he really does have the pick of the litter, he realizes, the only one of the Hargreeves pack to roll over and show him her belly and beg him to pet it of her own accord. He's chosen so well.

He starts reeling.

Plies her with conversation, implying bashfully that he too is lonely and friendless (which, well. He is.), listening to her insipid little comments about the things on his workbench and widens his eyes, calling her so mature for her age, maybe even mature enough to be friends with him. 

She’s looking at him with doeish eyes, and he pivots the conversation, steps further into the spotlight of aspiration she’s cast in his direction. He, useless, ordinary he, has managed to grow up, to build a wonderful business and a life of his own despite his unspecialness, despite being all alone, and… oh, wouldn’t it be  _ wonderful  _ if he could show her how? Wouldn't it be _wonderful,_ if they could be friends forever, and never feel alone again?

He’s got her now, has her driving the hook down her throat. But there’s still a chance that it could rip out if he pulls her in too fast. So he relaxes his hold. 

Leonard glances at the clock: “It’s half past six now. Gotta close up, you know? Time to head out.”

So he packs up slowly, begins turning off lights. Waits for her to follow his lead.

And sure enough, Vanya pops up beside him, and he thinks it a little sweet that she wants to help. So he lets her, handing her pieces to shelf and tools to hang up, lets her retrieve the keys from where he has them under the counter. Pets her head, calling her  _ so good, _ and watches her blush.

Now, his father would say, is when he needs to give her some slack.

“Vanya,” he asks, careful to let the edge of his words quiver just a bit, mimicking uncertainty, “Will you be alright going home on your own?”

He watches her stiffen, waits. 

“Or would you rather… not?”

She looks up, and he knows he’s got her. 

“You know,” he says, leaning closer to her, watching her swell a bit and swallow in anticipation, “I was thinking about heading to my grandmother’s cabin for a few days. This was meant to be my vacation week, you know? I was going to spend it up in the woods, fishing, boating, walking the trails. Maybe do some bird-watching. It’s quiet up there, beautiful...”

He points to the framed photo of the cabin on the wall, and sees her lean forward in interest. “But it gets lonely up there, all on my own, since I don’t have anyone to spend time with anymore.”

She straightens.

“And I was wondering…”

Pause here. Let her do the work, let her tire herself out, thinking she’s free, that she has a choice in this.

And she does: “You’d let me come  _ with  _ you?”

He starts reeling again.

Here, he takes care to blink, raise his eyebrows, duck his head and shrug his shoulders. “Well, would you  _ like  _ to? Would your family be okay with it?”

She’s nodding, little liar, beaming with stars in her eyes, and oh, he’s  _ got  _ her now, she’s in his hands, too stupid to realize that she really ought to be thrashing. 

He lets her lock up, watches her fumble with the keys for a few minutes, little idiot that she is. But they have all the time in the world now. He’s landed her, and soon enough, he’ll flay her, carving out the bits he doesn’t like, filling her up with compliments, making her confident and good and  _ his _ . And when she is good and ready, he will serve her to her siblings, and they will choke on it.

“You want to stop for something, before we get on the highway? I’m feeling McDonald's, personally.” (This, for the record, he is not lying about. He skipped dinner for this.)

He feels her shoulder brushing into his, is aware of what she’s clumsily trying to do. He doesn't lean back, doesn't close a hand around hers, doesn't say anything at all. He also doesn't push her away. He'll allow it, he decides. Whatever it takes, to keep her near. 

They leave behind the little orange bottle of pills Vanya had set on his counter to do her violin demonstration. 

In a few hours, they’ll reach the cabin, and he will ply her with something that will make her flush the meds from her system faster, then put her to bed. 

Tomorrow morning, the drugs will be out of her system, and he will encourage her to stumble upon what they awaken; maybe he'll set something up, make her feel like a hero. She'll be eating out of his hand.

Tomorrow morning, he will be the hero he’d always dreamed of being as a boy, rescuing her from the shock of her powers awakening, guiding her as a benevolent teacher, telling her how  _ lucky  _ she is that she’s here with him, out in the middle of nowhere where they can practice together as long as they'll need to without interruption. 

Tomorrow morning, his plan will really begin, and like the stupid little pet she is, she’ll help him enact it with a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding this chapter: it's all in Leonard's very subjective POV, so.... regarding how well his plan will actually turn out, I'm hoping that we'll all take a look at his overconfident ass and go [john cena voice: are you sure about that?]


	6. Chapter 6

Vanya doesn’t come slinking guiltily back to him, so Five curls up in his bed alone. It’s colder than he expected it would be, and he’s already unused to the amount of space he has, so he settles his pillow at his side and leans an arm around it. That’s all there is to it; he does not miss her, he just likes the feeling of a shape next to him, is all.

He still has trouble falling asleep, but he nods off sometime after midnight. His exhaustion wins.

He oversleeps, waking up with an awful cramp in his neck, drool on his pillow, and no clear memory of what he’d been dreaming of, only that it makes him awaken all at once, with his heart pounding and a prickling feeling in his chest.

Vanya is not beside him, and the bed is cold. He has been the only one sleeping here. There are forty-one other bedrooms in this house; she's chosen any of them and has spent the night there instead, to prove a point.

_ Fine then, _ Five huffs.  _ Stay mad. See if I care. _

He dresses quickly, expecting her to come skipping through the door at any moment, but she doesn’t.

He jumps down to the basement kitchen, lands unbalanced and dizzy, as he is jumping on an empty stomach, hasn’t eaten a thing for a full twenty-four hours. Five looks to Vanya’s usual spot at the corner of the table, but it is occupied by Luther, reading a self-help book of some sort on fostering teenagers. The chair seems to be his place now, as he had been in the night they first arrived, and he brightens at Five when he enters, like a big dog. If he had a tail, it would be wagging.

Five avoids eye contact, and reaches for the bread, peanut butter and marshmallows. 

He makes his sandwich while answering Luther’s many, many questions with curt ‘yeses’ and ‘nos.’

_ Yes,  _ he slept well.

_ Yes,  _ he dreamed.

_ No,  _ he doesn’t remember what it was.

_ No,  _ it was not one of  _ those _ dreams.

_ No,  _ he does not need Luther to explain the concept of  _ those dreams _ to him. He would rather resurrect their father, than sit through Luther explaining the concept of those dreams.

_ No,  _ he doesn’t want to know about Luther’s dream. 

_ No,  _ Diego hasn’t crashed into his fire escape covered in blood and with a wild look in his eye, that happens  _ how often? Every night since Monday? Really? _

_ No, _ he hasn’t seen Klaus. 

_ No, _ he hasn’t smelled any weed yet. 

_ No,  _ he hasn’t felt any urges to try any of Klaus’s substances.

_ Yes,  _ he would like his space now.

_ Yes,  _ Luther, the parenting book you’re reading about relating to teenagers is accurate in assuming that they like their space. 

Allison struts in, wearing something Five assumes is up to the current fashion trends, proclaiming that she’s leaving for her flight to Los Angeles, and, as if summoned by the announcement alone, Pogo arrives. 

He shuffles into the kitchen, calling to Luther, and, after hesitating and giving Allison an odd look, her as well.

“There’s something that I must show you in the basement,” Pogo says, limping deeper into the house, gesturing for them to follow, which they do. “I had hoped that we would all be able to forget it, but it seems I’ve been mistaken.”

“Will this take long?” Allison asks.

“Yes.”

“... Am I going to need to reschedule my flight.” It’s not a question.

“Yes.”

“Fuck.” Allison groans. “I’m never going to see my kid again.”

“Doubtful, dear,” says Pogo, “Your father arranged for a copy of the court file to be made available to him. I read it. It’s horrendous.”

“You know what, Pogo,” Luther says quickly. Five imagines him leaning in to quickly move the conversation in a different direction, thinks him weak for wanting to help Allison get on her plane. If  _ he  _ were Luther he’d applaud Pogo for keeping Allison close. If he actually cared about Allison as much as he seems to, he'd never just let her _leave._

“We already saw the mess Klaus left in the laundry room this morning,” Luther continues, “I’ll have a talk with him about why you can’t put Dawn in the machine.”

“I’m referring to the other basement.”

“We have  _ another  _ basement?”

“Wow! The house really is a castle, huh, Allison?”

"I guess."

“Yes. Now, shall I show you the dungeon?” In his absence, Pogo seems to have developed a dry sense of humor, and a perfectly deadpan delivery. That’s new. Five likes it.

The voices fade.

Five listens for a moment, then shrugs, and finishes his sandwich, glancing at Luther’s book. He’s highlighting it in several colors. 

He jumps to the foyer, puts his feet up on the couch, the way Dad never liked him to, and doesn’t feel as much satisfaction as he should expect to.

He stares up at himself, in oil form, and frowns at the severity of his gaze. The more that he looks at it, the less it looks like  _ him, _ so he hurries off, pausing for a moment to note that the enormous portrait of their father at the far end of the parlor is missing. There’s a lighter patch of wood where it had once hung, but the painting itself is missing.

Five frowns, and jumps to the courtyard. A patch of grayish dirt is to his left, and he assumes it’s Dad. He takes care to step around him as he walks to a pile of burned objects in the center of the yard, doesn’t want Dad dirtying his shoes. When he kicks through the scorched whatever-it-is, he recognizes a pattern on a piece of blackened debris as the corner of the frame. Five smiles down at Dad’s desecrated face in what he thinks might be pride at Luther, but wouldn’t know for certain, since he’s never felt it before.

_ Huh. Luther does have some balls after all. Took him long enough. _

Five doesn’t turn around, to look at Ben’s statue. Doesn’t want to look. Jumps right back inside, and takes up roaming its halls, glancing casually, and then not-so-casually around its corners for a glimpse of Vanya. 

He doesn’t get one. The morning wears on, and Five sees and hears no one.

There’s one exception: Echoing through the vents, from deep in the heart of the house, Five hears Luther bellow **“You did** **_what?”_ **

Naturally, he assumes Klaus is being an idiot again, so he carries on.

He wanders the house, staring at the wallpaper in the children’s hallway, suddenly so faded, tracing scratches left by Diego’s knives that simply hadn’t been there before. 

Five stops reflexively in front of Vanya’s door, swings it open automatically and leans in. He’s taken aback by the strangeness of the room. He gets what Vanya was talking about now; not a single one of her things is here, and the wall has been sledgehammered open. Klaus has consumed the room and absorbed it into its own, and his touch has spread throughout the room like a cancer in the form of odd drawings in pen on the bare brick of the walls, a bean bag with some ominous stains on it, a lava lamp with a fine layer of dust on it, and a lopsided happy face traced into the dust.

He imagines Klaus doing the same to his room, and shivers. 

And, because Luther has planted the seed in his head, he glances to Klaus’s bed, shoved up against the wall. It’s empty, but unfolded. Klaus has either not slept in it at all, or Grace’s strange new bent on independence has extended to not doing all the housework.

Speaking of, he finds Grace in Allison’s room, trying on a pair of her pants. She asks him his honest opinion, and Five answers honestly: He does not care at all. Also, they are backwards, but given that this may be the first time she’s ever worn pants, he thinks she’s doing just fine.

He does  double- take at the sight of Grace’s feet. They’re flat, not molded in the strange, doll-like, painful-looking shape that consigned them to being eternally fit only for two-inch-tall heels. 

Grace notices, and plops onto Allison’s bed, sticking her feet up in the air. He assumes that if her toes weren’t molded together, she’d be wiggling them proudly, and wonders if that’s the next update. 

“I’m doing  _ lots  _ of self-improvement,” she says. “I’m thinking of replacing my eyes next, and I’ve just let down my hair; I might cut it, you know. My feet are my latest improvement, and I’m quite proud of them. I boiled the plastic down, and reshaped the wire skeleton, before re-molding my feet, so I can wear flats and sneakers now. Isn’t that just  _ wonderful?” _

“Alright,” he says flatly. “Thanks for telling me that.” There’s no doubt in his mind about what his latest nightmare will be about tonight.

He decides to leave her be.

Gradually, he makes his way back to his own bedroom, and stares at the open fire escape.

Five remembers hearing Vanya cry yesterday, after they’d fought. It had gone echoing up the alley, through his fire escape window, and he’d sat there for a while, listening to it, feeling a cold, heavy feeling sink into his limbs and his ears burning. 

When it stopped, he assumed she’d gotten up and slunk back into the house, and, on the off chance that she hadn’t, and might be able to see him through the window, he crawled on his hands and knees across the room, and peeked up and over the windowsill, down into the alley. Sure enough, she had not been there. There was no one at all, just a few dumpsters, some splinters, and a trail of truck exhaust.

Five sees the same sight now, sans truck exhaust, and frowns.

“Vanya,” he calls casually, expecting her to materialize out of the shadows, full of conspiracies to share with him, as ready as he is to forget about what they’d said to each other yesterday.

She doesn’t come.

Five calls again, and there’s still nothing. It feels like there’s a clock ticking inside his head, and the alarm is about to blare. 

His stomach drops.  He needs to find someone, now.


	7. Chapter 7

Luther’s strides are wide and urgent, and Five, on his way to the basement kitchen, leaps out of the way when he comes barreling down a hallway that isn’t big enough for the both of them. 

He’s shouting orders to Grace, sending her to retrieve Diego, and Klaus if she can, to do it _now,_ do it _fast._

Five zaps to the kitchen, watches Grace leap to her feet and stare at Luther, wide-eyed and unblinking. The classified section of the newspaper, which she had been looking at for job openings, drops to the ground, and it takes her a moment. He can hear the gears whizzing in her head, watch her slowly process something.

She sighs, oddly, as if she were relieved. “I see. I’ll tell him, then.” 

This puzzles Five, but before he can ask her, she’s off, snatching her purse and hurrying out one of the many side doors. 

“What is--” Five begins, but Luther interrupts again, bellowing through the house for Klaus, and then Vanya. His tone is tense, like they’re all twelve and on a mission again, and something instinctive in Five, cultured by years of aggressive conditioning, immediately silences itself. 

He goes rigid, feels his willpower begin to drain away, becomes suddenly alert and receptive. 

He waits for Luther to stop pacing like a mother bear whose just arrived at her den to find it ransacked and her cubs missing. 

Finally, after a minute of roaring, Luther goes quiet, and turns to Five, suddenly Number One again, suddenly _confident._

“Where’s Vanya?” he interrogates, and Five’s heart pitches. 

Something’s wrong, he _knew_ it. 

“I don’t know?” His voice is shaking, why is it shaking?

“When did you last see her?”

“I… Yesterday. We had a fight.” He feels his throat closing up, is suddenly possessive over the details of their conversation.

Luther’s jaw clenches. “About what?”

Five opens his mouth, and then closes it.

“Five,” Luther’s voice warms, and he stoops down, to look him in the eye, “Please. This is important.”

“It was stupid.”

“No it wasn’t, okay? I’m sure it was important.”

“It was… It was…” Five swallows, doesn’t understand why his eyes are burning, “She was mad at me. Because I was ignoring her.”

“And why were you doing that?”

“Because I was working on my equations. I was trying to find the way back.”

Luther cocks his head. “Back in time? To when you left?”

“Yeah, I… I wanted to go back, so we could save Ben.”

A quiet, soft little noise breaks out of Luther’s throat.

“And… and--” -- And why’s he stumbling like this, for fuck’s sake he isn’t _Diego._

Luther leans forward, takes Five into his great, monstrous arms, and Five feels the twisted, unnatural slopes of his back through his overcoat. The way they press into them only makes Five’s stomach crawl, as the guilt starts chewing on him again.

 _He_ did that, by leaving, and by not taking everyone else with him. He’d saved Vanya, but he’d doomed everyone else to a horrible life, and now they’re all walking shells of themselves. _He_ did that.

“I’m _sorry.”_

“About what?” Luther’s great chest rumbles, and Five can feel his enlarged heart thumping gently, like an elephant’s might.

“I… I did this.” Five pulls back, stares at Luther’s enormous torso, and watches him tense. He hears his words begin to blubber, _hates_ himself for it. “It’s my fault. You’re like this because of me. I could have saved you all, but I didn’t. And I can’t find a way back, so I can’t fix it.”

Luther leans back over Five, and envelops him. Five buries his face in his coat, and tries to wrap his arms around Luther’s middle, but finds he can’t.

“No,” Luther rumbles, bringing a great hand up to pat Five’s back, “No, it’s fine. You’re fine. You didn’t know this would happen.”

There’s a soft sniffling sound coming from over his shoulder. When Five realizes it’s Luther, he remembers his teenage dignity, and immediately sucks all the emotion back into himself like a vacuum, dropping his arms from around Luther’s torso. 

“That’s disgusting,” Five spits, pushing at Luther, who lets him go, rising back to his full height. 

Luther stares down at him, with a big dopeish smile. “Can’t say I missed that.”

“Shut up. What were we doing again?”

Luther exhales sharply, then nods. Back to Number One Mode, he briefs Five: “Allison and I just learned some news about Vanya. It’s a big deal, so we need to talk to her as soon as possible. We need to call a family meeting. Are you sure you haven’t seen her?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Then we’d better get to looking.”

Five falls into step behind him, as he always does on missions, and though it’s been a few days since Five’s last drill, and years since Luther’s, the two find the rhythm instantly. He supposes that for Luther, it’s like stepping into a pair of old shoes that know the shape of your feet, and have long since molded to them.

They make their way in a spiraling pattern he remembers from home invasion drills, traversing the house from bottom to top, treading the halls he recognizes and the empty ones in the outskirts of the house, full of locked doors to empty rooms he’s never seen the point in frequenting. 

“She’s gone, isn’t she?” Five asks when they stare at the room that had once been hers.

“We don’t know that yet.”

“She’s gone. She ran away from the house, and she’s gone. And I made her leave.”

“Well, let’s just finish the search. Then we’ll call the meeting, see who shows up, and we’ll see what to do from there.”

They’re on the roof, sweeping the observatory and the greenhouse, and Grace’s vegetable garden, when they find Klaus.

He’s locked himself inside of Grace’s garden shed, somehow, proudly admitting to it after Luther tries the door and finds it unyielding. 

“Well, where are the keys?”

“How on _earth_ should I know? I threw them out the skylight as soon as I’d locked the door.”

“... Well, why’d you do that?”

“I’m being proactive, just like you always say we should be, Lu. You should be proud! I’m staving off temptation.”

Five blinks. “How did you expect to get out of here, then? Do you have any food? Water?”

There’s a beat.

“You know, I hadn’t actually thought of that. Whoops.”

Luther and Five glance at each other, and nod.

Luther tears the door off the hinges, and Five dutifully takes it when it’s handed to him, and leans it against the wall, shaking off Luther’s worries about splinters.

“Oh,” Klaus wheels to greet them, with a manual on proper tulip maintenance in his hands. His eyes are pinkish, and puffy, and he’s got a scattered energy about him that makes Five tense. He also has his clothes in a pile on the floor, and is only wearing Grace’s neon-pink gardening apron. “Hello, boys! Flattered to see you’re _so_ concerned about me! Would you believe I’m actually _not_ getting high up here? That I’m turning a new leaf and trying my hand at the straightedge lifestyle? That I’ve at long last seen the light and chosen to go sober at last?”

“No,” they reply flatly in unison.

“Oh.” Klaus frowns, and his gaze goes blank as he starts muttering out of the corner of his mouth. “Well, I mean, I _get_ it, but _jeez.”_ Then, oddly, “Shut _up.”_

"What's with the..." Five gestures at the apron.

Klaus grimaces. "I've got the sweats. Don't wear leather pants if you're planning to sober up." He gestures at the apron. "This is to protect my modesty."

"Right. Because you're so modest."

Klaus ignores him, in favor of peering past him, shooting a sour look at the blank space behind Five's shoulder.

“Vanya up here?” Luther asks, glancing over Klaus’s shoulder, as if she’d be crouched behind a table somewhere inside.

“Luther,” Klaus sighs, leaning a quivering hand on the corner of a table piled high with cobweb-coated pots, “You know, I’m not trying to _corrupt_ her or anything. And even if I did have an interest in getting her high to see if she loosens up and gets _fun_ for once, which I don’t, I mean, swear to God, why on earth would I _ever_ hang out with _Vanya--”_

“Klaus,” Luther says, “For once in your life, would you please _shut the fuck up,_ and take this seriously?”

Klaus, like Five, has never heard Luther curse before in his life. 

So, he shuts the fuck up, and takes it seriously. 

“Has there been a death?”

Five blanches, and glances at Luther.

“No,” he says, grabbing Klaus’s clothes off the floor and hurling them at him, “Put these on and get downstairs. Right now. Family meeting. It’s about Vanya.” 

“Dear God,” Klaus says, leaning in conspiratorially to whisper in Five’s ear, “The last time we had one of those, we fought over how to put Mom to sleep.”

_“What?”_

“You think this one’ll be about which one of us’ll take Vanya out back and shoot her? I for one, think we ought to draw straws.”

Five stops dead in his tracks and draws in a quick breath, staring nervously at Luther, who’s glaring at Klaus.

“Downstairs,” Luther growls at Klaus, who suddenly straightens up. _“Now.”_

They descend quickly, in silence, Klaus hopping into each pants leg as they go.

There, they hear the slamming of the door that signals Diego’s arrival with Grace, and oddly, Luther doesn’t go to greet him. Instead, he takes them down a side-hall Five’s never spent much time in, where Allison is. Her face is pale, and pink, and she is crying.

Five stops dead in his tracks, when he realizes that Allison is standing in a doorway that he has _never seen before._

It’s an elevator. The house doesn’t _have_ an elevator.

The six of them crowd onto it, all elbows, but no one says a word. 

The ride down takes a full minute, and Five feels his heart dropping.

When they emerge, in a long, low tunnel that catches their voices and extends them into echoes as soon as they leave their mouths, the first one to speak is Klaus.

“What the _fuck?”_

No one answers him. They walk down the hallway, to where Pogo is waiting for them expectantly. He opens a second door, and shows them to a large, dark chamber with a strange contraption at the center of it all.

“A _cell?”_ goes Diego, with an oddly high pitch to his voice, “W-what’s it doing here? What’s going _on?”_

Grace sighs, and drops her head, folding her perfect plastic hands on Diego’s forearm. “I’m so sorry, I spent the whole week trying to determine how best to tell you.”

“Tell us _what?”_

Allison and Luther turn as one, fixing Pogo with a venomous glare. 

Five doesn’t catch what anyone else is doing. He stares into the dark, at the sarcophagus buried under the house, and feels a knot of dread settle in his gut, feels every cell in his body screaming at him to gather the folds of space-time between his fingers and tear his way out. But he keeps walking, refuses to let himself be haunted by a ghost he’s never even known existed at all. 

He can’t strike up the nerve to step inside, the way Allison does, only peeks his head in like an inquisitive animal.

It’s enough to make every hair on him stand on end. The room’s dark, with a single ancient lightbulb sputtering weakly, and spikes that are soft to the touch lining the rounded chamber. There are drag marks on the floor, as though someone had moved furniture in it long ago.

And there’s something _wrong_ with the air inside of it-- it’s too still, too sterile, utterly _dead_ and the silence washing over him makes his blood pound in his eardrums.

He decides to jump after all.

Five lands in the basement kitchen, curls up in a chair, and waits for everyone to follow him up.

When they do, when they gather with him and Luther plants an enormous, warm hand on Five’s shoulder, he doesn’t bother shrugging it off. The weight is nice.

Allison’s eyes are red and puffy, and she begins steadily working her way through a box of tissues Grace has handed her, mumbling in hesitant, quivering words the story of Vanya’s power, and how it had been forgotten. 

So. Vanya has powers. Dear God.

He wants to head out to the courtyard, and kick Dad’s ash.

But he fights off the urge, chooses instead to listen to Luther, explaining that Vanya is not in the house, that they must find her as quickly as possible. He begins outlining a detailed plan. 

They dive into it immediately, without complaint. The team, it seems, is back together. 

They start with security footage, and it isn’t long at all before Allison scrolls to the right one situated in the back alley, above Five’s fire escape. They watch Klaus toss a boxful of trash into the dumpster, a strange man scoop what looks like a book out of it.

“What’s that trash diver got?” Diego asks.

Pogo hisses through his teeth, and fixes Klaus with a seething glare.

Klaus tuts, “Hey now, Doc. You’re the one who’s on probation for the rest of the year, after what you just tried to hide.”

“What is it?” Diego repeats, impatiently.

“A journal of your father’s, containing vital information about each of the seven of you. I fear that with it, this man may have the ability to subdue you all.”

_“Klaus.”_

“Hey, I didn’t read it! It’s not my fault Dad’s handwriting sucks! I thought it was personal! _Dear diary, today I drowned twelve newborn kittens in a bucket of maple syrup… That_ kind of thing!”

They scroll forward some more, change the tapes, and find Klaus, shrieking at Pogo, smashing a familiar violin to pieces and storming off. 

“Klaus, honest to god, _really?”_

“I have a problem,” he admits sheepishly.

“No _shit.”_

Klaus slinks into the video room, remains there for the rest of the time they’re browsing, hiding guiltily among shelves and shelves of family memories stretching back to the day the cameras had been installed.

Finally, they find Vanya, keeled over and sobbing. Five is at once reminded by what he’d heard, and shrinks behind Allison, not wanting to watch.

“Oh fuck,” Diego says, “Who’s _that?”_

Five pops his head over Allison’s shoulder and then feels his gut clench at the sight of Vanya, having an inaudible conversation with the same strange man they’d seen a few tapes earlier, taking the man’s hand, climbing into his truck and puttering away.

“My God,” Grace says.

“She’s been stranger dangered,” says Luther.

Then the video room explodes into a flurry of concerned noise, which lasts for five minutes until Allison shuts the room up with a shrill Grace-like _“Quiet!”_

They get down to business. Grace deciphers the name on the side of the truck, _Imperial Woodworking_ , and the group stampedes down the hall and into the library, where they settle into digging through a mountain of records: phone books and binders of private tax and property information that Klaus says is “probably illegal, but who knows?”

“Definitely illegal,” Five says. “It’s Dad.”

Instead of sputtering in bootlicking protest, Luther hums in agreement, and that’s how Five knows the end is truly nigh. 

Klaus finds the business, and Luther the man who owns it, some Leonard Peabody, and Allison learns that he was recently recognized by the city for his excellence in community service helping ex-cons learn marketable woodworking skills. 

“I don’t _trust_ that,” she says, and everyone groans.

Five finds two addresses attached to the Peabody name: a house in a middle-class suburb, and a lake cabin a county over, well outside of the city.

Diego, like the class act he is, puts his boot in his mouth, and makes a particularly dark joke about what could be possibly happening at that cabin-- “Hey, Allison, ever watch Twin Peaks?”-- and six separate hands reach up to smack him. 

Naturally, because they’re idiots, they pile into Reginald’s car, one on top of the other, like newborn puppies in a whining, squirming pile, and head to the house that is obviously the less-perfect place to take a kidnapping victim first. 

Pogo waits in the car, turning on classic jazz radio to keep him company, as the family swarms the house, and it really is like old times, Five supposes. Except they’re all older, dumber, Grace is here, and no one but him’s in a uniform. Also, there’s a crowd of nosy neighbors gathering at the end of the driveway. He waves cockily at them, knowing that the family lawyers will protect them from any kind of damage they’re about to incur.

Naturally, Diego hurls himself through the door to gain them entry, and naturally, they find nothing. 

“God,” Allison says, “We really _do_ suck at this.”

Luther squeezes her hand, rubbing his big thumb over the back of her palm, and Five slides around the corner, suddenly very embarrassed. He’s not sure what it’s like, to have a mother and father who love each other and show each other little displays of affection, but this might be close. It’s reassuring, if slightly nauseating.

“There’s a phone here,” Luther says. “You can call the airline company, schedule that next flight.”

There’s silence, then: “Honestly? Fuck it. I’m staying.”

Five cackles, and jumps before they realize he’s been listening to them.

They look around a bit longer. Diego winces at the collection of Umbrella Academy memorabilia in what can only be described as a shrine upstairs, and when Five sees it, he is at once overwhelmed with a sense of horror. They’re not just fighting a murderous psychopath, they’re fighting a _fan._

“It’ll make kicking his ass a lot more fun,” Diego says, and they’re all in agreement.

Klaus returns from raiding the fridge for “road snacks” and then they’re on the subject of who’s going to be sitting where on the long and certainly-to-be-miserable ride to the Cabin Of Unfortunate Implication.

“I call shotgun,” says Ben.

Everyone screams.


	8. Chapter 8

They are shaken by the blue, flickering form of Ben, grinning at them.

 _Wow,_ Five thinks, to get his mind off the way his eyes are burning, _Dad’s statue of you was shit, huh?_

“Hey,” Ben says, turning the moonlike light of his soft face towards him, and Five promptly loses that battle. “I missed you too.”

He looks _good,_ all things considered. Five isn’t sure how old he is, late teens or early twenties maybe, but he’s taller than him, and the baby fat has all but vanished from his face. Ben became _handsome,_ after they’d left. Also, he has a cool jacket.

Five shoves past Allison, and throws himself into Ben’s arms, screwing his eyes shut.

Someone exclaims behind him, and he expects to fall right through Ben, face-first onto the driveway. 

Instead, the soft, cool, slightly translucent shape holds his weight, and he feels soft pressure return his hug.

“Didn’t expect that,” he hears Ben say, and Klaus replies, “I’m _good,_ aren’t I?”

Above him, he hears the clapping of a high five. 

Cool, airy fingers sift through Five’s hair, and he smiles. Fuck, he’s crying a lot today.

Five eventually pulls loose, remembering suddenly that he is in public, surrounded by his family, showing such weakness. Unacceptable.

“How the hell...?” he hears Allison asking from behind him.

Klaus, grinning like a hyena, raises his fingers, blue and shining, and shrugs. “Turns out there’s a lot I never tried to learn. And you really have the littles to thank.”

“I am _not_ little--”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I mean. Being high all the time around kids isn’t exactly… you know?”

“Decent?” says Luther.

“Sane?” says Diego.

 _“Remotely_ acceptable?” says Allison.

“That.” Klaus waves his hands. “So, we figured…”

“Oh, are you going sober, sweetheart?” asks Grace, and Klaus nods. “Oh, that’s wonderful! I’ll be sure to destroy all of your father’s rare alcohol collection as soon as we return to the house.”

Klaus suddenly blanches. “Well, let’s not be so hasty--”

“Burn it all,” says Ben coolly, slapping Five on the back. “We are _not_ fucking around with this, Klaus.” 

Klaus shrugs. 

“Hey,” Luther says, “We need to get moving. Ben, can I hug you later?”

“Absolutely.”

“Great. Now we’ve got to head up to that cabin and get this done. That guy has our sister.”

“How are we going to handle this?” asks Diego.

“However we have to,” Luther says grimly, and Five blinks at the implication. Luther’s changed a lot, he keeps learning.

They’re all quiet for a moment, and Five suddenly remembers Ben’s queasiness, how he had always been so reluctant to unleash the monster roiling around in his gut, how he’d always spent hours in the shower trying to get the blood off. He realizes what they’re waiting for: Ben, the consummate pacifist, to raise a complaint against the thought of lethal force. 

He doesn’t.

“What, no issues with violence?” Diego asks.

“Fuck no, let’s beat the shit out of this guy.”

With that, the seven of them pile into the car, which was only built for five people. It’s a miserable experience that results in Five pressed up against the window in the backseat with Allison and Luther, Klaus leaping into the trunk, Ben going… somewhere, and Diego landing shotgun. He pulls Grace into his lap, which draws stares from everyone as Pogo backs them out and sets them on their way.

“So,” Allison eventually comments, looking over at Diego and Grace, who is staring at the map, and pointing out an exit to Pogo, “I guess _that’s_ happening now.”

Diego glances back at Allison, who has not let go of Luther’s hand once, and wryly replies, “That too?”

Luther firmly replies, “Yup.” And they leave it at that. Five feels a visceral urge, deep in his gut, to leap out of the moving car and escape the tension prickling in the air. 

They stress-eat the box of Twinkies Klaus stole immediately, and Five ignores Allison’s attempts to get him to play I Spy with her. His knee keeps bouncing, and he can’t get it to stop.

“Where’s Ben?” he finally asks, suddenly remembering that he’s gone. 

“We’re spooning,” replies Klaus from the trunk.

“Nice,” says Diego.

“Thanks!”

Grace simply glances around. “Ben’s here?”

“You… didn’t pick that up,” Luther says, and he and Allison exchange a glance.

“Pogo, are you sure you fixed everything when you… you know?” asks Allison.

“Quite sure,” he replies, glancing over at Grace with his enormous gray brow furrowed.

“No need to worry, everyone,” Grace replies smoothly, “It isn’t an issue with my internal processes, nor my hardware. It’s just that, if what I am reading from the subtext of the past conversation is true, then Ben is a ghost. I cannot perceive him at all, but because you’re all reacting as such, and according to my memory drive, you would not lie about such a serious matter.”

“Oh,” Five says, and they all process the information.

“Therefore,” she says, smiling, “He is here. Would you please tell him that I love him, and that I hope he is doing well?”

“Yeah,” goes Klaus from somewhere beneath Five’s ass, “Yeah, I can do that. He says he loves you too.”

“That’s great!”

The rest of the car drive is quiet.

They’re all staring grimly out the window as the light fades, and Five begins to pick up their tells, the way he was once able to a week ago, when he’d been in the past and knew them much better. They’ve changed now, but, as he’s finding, not that much, and their first true mission in seventeen years has awakened those long-dormant instincts in them all.

Luther is rigid and grim, staring straight ahead. Allison, wetting her lips and clearing her throat in preparation. Diego’s eyes are flitting everywhere they can, and he’s taking long, slow breaths. Five assumes that behind them, Klaus is twitching nervously and Ben has his hands wrapped around his abdomen. 

He tries to keep himself busy, counting the trees as they whiz past in a shadowy blur, making note of the signs as they go, on the off chance that he may need to walk home, as he once did when he was slow in getting to the car after a mission in New York.

He doesn’t let his mind wander too much, knowing it’ll lead to images of the cabin, whatever it may look like, of Vanya, alone and afraid in a strange place with a strange man pretending he wants to take care of her…

No. Nope. Not going there. 

To relax, Five thinks of murder. Of wrapping his hands around the man… what’s his name, Larry? Of wrapping his hands around Larry’s neck and wringing until he feels it crack and twist under his fingers. 

It’s a good thought. He likes it, so he keeps it up.

The sky goes dark, and they’re far enough from the city that he should be able to see the stars, but the sky is vast and dark, with only the scarred face of the moon staring down at them. 

Finally, after a thousand years, they pull off onto a country road that’s illuminated by a few scattered street lamps, and roll uphill.

“That’s… odd,” Grace says, and at once everyone in the car has perked up, like a pack of hunting dogs that have caught the scent of blood.

“What’s odd?”

“The cabin. The address says it should be just ahead, and my night vision--”

“You have night vision?”

“Yes. It’s very good. I ought to be able to see the building through the trees, but… _Oh.”_

“Oh?” goes Klaus from the trunk. 

_“Oh,”_ breathes Allison, as they roll closer, and the twisted, splintered shell of what had once been a cabin becomes visible.

They leap out of the car all at once, not even waiting for it to stop. The cold night air wraps around him all at once, and he doesn’t even flinch.

Five gapes, hears Allison cry out, but keeps running.

It looks as if a tropical storm had descended suddenly over the cabin, and all the trees surrounding it. He’s staring at a hurricane of splintered wood, stone, glass and debris, with not a single wall left standing.

“Oh shit,” he hears Diego breathe, as he reaches the ruins, climbing up the lip of what he’s realizing is a _crater_. 

Everything is jagged and strangely beautiful, painted silver by the moonlight, like a nest of knives and needles, and they tear into his hands and bare knees and fuck, he _hates_ these shorts. 

And there, in the eye of it all, is Vanya, curled into a ball, wet with blood.

He skids down into the crater, dumbly forgetting his own power, and cries out to her, watching her lift her head groggily.

Five trips over something soft, but keeps going, doesn’t stop until he reaches her, grabbing her by the shoulders and wrapping himself around her.

There’s a sudden swelling in his chest, and he chokes out one ragged sob. _Idiot,_ he tells himself, as the second cry somehow leaves him as a laugh.

He looks down past her, and realizes that she has not been waiting for them alone.

When Luther had thrown a bank robber out of a skylight millennia ago, they’d come across the body later, lying in the middle of the street, crumpled and leaking. That is what the kidnapper, Leonard, reminds Five of. He is twisted into a grotesque array of limbs, stuck through with shards of everything like a pincushion, almost completely lost in the chaos of Vanya’s carnage.

It doesn’t take a genius to deduce what happened: She’s killed him. 

He remembers his first kill. It was rough on him too.

He looks away, grabs Vanya’s face, pulling it towards him, so she can’t look either. His hold on her is a little more rough than he intended, so he loosens it, but she doesn’t seem to mind at all, leaning a cheek drying with blood that he now knows isn’t hers into his palm. She’s covered with dust, and it smears away in his hand.

Vanya stares at him, pale, with a white flicker sparking for a split second in her pupils. For a moment, he doesn’t recognize her at all, struck with the sense that he’s looking at a different person wearing his sister’s face. But that’s _stupid,_ she’s _Vanya._

“Hi,” she says dully, as though she were answering from somewhere deep within herself where she’s retreated. 

“Hey, are you okay?”

“Not really,” her eyes rove the destruction around them and widen as if this is the first time she’s understood what’s in front of her, “Five, I have _powers.”_

“Yeah. Yeah, you do.”

“I killed him,” she says suddenly, glancing down at the body. “My powers woke up, and he helped me with them, but he started getting really weird, and I missed you, and I tried to leave, and…”

“He didn’t like that.”

“No.”

“So you killed him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s okay. You’re okay.”

“Thank you.” She seems to crawl out, from that dark place deep within her, and he begins to recognize her again.

The others have reached the crest of the wreckage now, and are picking their way in clumsily, as though they were trying to navigate a deep snow. Even Ben, which strikes Five as especially odd, since he’s dead and shouldn’t have to worry about tripping and falling and impaling himself.

Vanya takes in a sharp breath as she observes his arrival. Ben seems to see her looking, pauses in his tracks and waves a luminous blue hand dopily, calling out “Hi Vanya! It’s me! I was here the whole time! You did this? It's so cool!”

“It’s been a really weird night, huh?” she says. There’s a little smile curling on her face.

“Yeah, it has.” 

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too.” 

“I’m sorry I was so shitty to you.” Her fingers crawl onto his back, and she pulls him tighter. “You should be able to take us back, so you can save him. You can even leave me here, if you want. That’ll be okay. I’ll be fine.”

Five chokes a bit. 

“No,” he says, “No, that won’t happen.”

“It’s fine, really.”

“No.” He’s firm. “We’re staying put. Unless… you want to go back?”

Vanya stares past him, at Luther and Diego clumsily lifting Grace over an enormous beam, at Allison micromanaging them, at Pogo swinging down with hominin grace that Five finds almost laughable, given his age, at Klaus leaping ten feet down from the ground and Ben yelling at him, before immediately doing the exact same thing and flopping on his face.

“I kinda like it here,” she admits. “Well, maybe not him-- ” -- she nods at the corpse-- “But the rest of it.”

“Me too,” he admits. “I really like Dad being dead.”

“That’s really nice.”

Their family reaches them at last, and Vanya is enveloped in a massive, warm, squirming group hug that Five fails to escape from. After a moment, he relaxes, succumbing to the sappiness of it all, and naturally, the moment he starts liking it-- the moment he feels his heart skip a beat and thinks, _maybe we'll stay--_ is the moment where Diego wriggles his way out, and the whole thing dissolves in bickering.

 _That’s alright,_ he decides, accepting Allison’s hand as she helps him to his feet and fusses over how he’s ruined his knees. _There’ll be others._

She and Luther help him and Vanya pick their way out of the mess carefully and slowly, while Ben and Diego debate where to hide the body, before they take Pogo’s advice and opt to leave it where it is. 

When they get back to the car, there’s a moment where Five and Vanya are alone together again, as Allison and Luther hurry back to help the others climb out of the ruins.

Five decides to use the time to fight with Vanya for the honor of taking the front seat, but Vanya, it seems, has other ideas that are much, much better.

She’s in front of him, suddenly, close enough to reach forward and touch her nose to his, and his heart’s kicking like a rabbit.

Vanya draws in a breath, takes his ruined hands in her cold ones, closes her eyes, and leans forward quickly, giving him a wet, clumsy kiss that he has no idea what to do with, but likes very, _very_ much. 

She pulls back almost as quickly as she’d leaned in, and her eyes are wide with worry. “Was that okay?”

Behind them, Diego is hooting, and Ben is shouting, “I fucking _told you_ , Klaus! I win!”

“Yeah,” Five says, stunned. “Yeah, that was _great.”_

They’re holding hands when everyone catches up to them, and for some reason, Five isn’t embarrassed at all by it.

“Was there a bet on us?” Vanya asks Ben.

“Absolutely.” He pats her on the shoulder, before hopping into the open trunk.

“Wow,” Vanya says, “He looks nothing like that statue.”

“Right?”

“Ben got _hot.”_

“Thank you,” says Ben, giving Vanya a wink that makes her blush.

Klaus shuffles up to them next, staring at Vanya nervously.

“Listen, Vanya, I’m… I’m really sorry about the violin. And about taking your room, though in my defense you weren’t exactly living in it when I took it--”

 _“Klaus,”_ hisses Ben, and, upon seeing the way Klaus’s eyes flit just beyond them, Five suddenly realizes what he had been looking at all this time.

“But it was still a shitty thing to do,” Klaus grovels, “I hope you can forgive me--”

“Sure,” she hisses, with a tone that chills Five to the bone. “After you buy me a new one. A nice one, one I pick myself.”

“I would… agree to that,” he says, before skittishly leaping into the trunk and hurriedly shutting it behind him. Vanya leans her shoulder into Five’s, and he is utterly terrified of her, and also a little bit proud.

“Do we need to make up a guest room?” asks Grace. There are splinters matted in her hair, and she doesn’t notice at all.

Five glances hopefully at Vanya, and she replies, “No. I’ll stay with Five again.”

A wide, smug grin starts crawling across his face, and Allison notices it immediately.

“Then in that case,” she says carefully, as though she were defusing a bomb with her words, “We really need to have a talk with you when you get back.”

“Told you,” says Klaus from the trunk. Diego kicks it.

They stuff the car with their previous seating positions, with one adjustment: Vanya, to Five’s delight and Pogo’s mortification, is in his lap.

“Hey Five,” says Diego slyly from the front once they start moving, “You remember the road gets real bumpy for a couple miles up ahead, right?”

He blanches, and shoves Vanya into the aisle. 

The road, it goes without saying, had never been bumpy, and he realizes this too late. Ahead of him, Diego cackles, and Five kicks the seat, then sheepishly tugs Vanya up from where she’s tangled in three sets of legs.

Vanya gives Five a firm look that makes his heart drop, but, to his relief, she accepts him. She curls up against him, entwines his fingers with hers, and rests her forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the night whip by. It isn’t long before she starts nodding off, and soon enough, she’s dozing on his shoulder, a warm weight on him that settles him, making him feel utterly calm.

They'll be back at the house in an hour, and there they will talk late into the night, and maybe even until the sun comes up, with their brothers and sister about where they shall go from here. There, they will buy Vanya her new violin, and dust off one of the long-unused bedrooms for her to use, and begin addressing what on earth she had done in the woods behind them. There, he will scrub the equations from his wall, and have a long talk with Ben about what's happened since he'd been gone. He and Vanya will settle into new lives here, and it feels _right._

He glances over, at Allison, snuggled into Luther’s side, staring up at him with a smile he’s never seen before, and a softness in her eyes that he thinks he’s starting to understand, as Luther’s head lolls. Ahead of them, Diego’s peering over Grace’s shoulder at the map, trying to read with only passing golden bars of lamp light to see by. Behind them, Ben and Klaus are doing whatever they’re doing, and Pogo is nodding along to a radio station turned down so low, Five can only detect the slight humming of music under the rumbling of the road beneath the tires.

They’ll be home soon enough, and for once in his life, he’s content for them to take as much time as they need to get there. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... So. I'm not thrilled with how the overall product turned out, but I did have a great time writing it, and I hope you all enjoyed it. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> (+'the curse' by agnes obel)


End file.
